LIFE A to Z

Absolute truth is a myth,

Beauty Love and God enter the human heart,

Creating new temples for personal deities,

Devotion is your own; private sacred beautiful,

Each moment is an abstraction

Frustrating by duality

        negatives catching up with absolute of the soul.

God is not to blame or praise for our expectation,

Higher you aspire greater is the pull of gravitas.

'I' alone matters, in the pull push of contrarian  virtues.

Just to choose is unjust can be evaded zestfully.

Kill or kiss are not the limit.

Looking for happiness we invite

Mindless pain never to aspire again.

Nothing is constant is a constant truth,

Open the gate let everything enter

            the living, non living, the inert.

Pause, think before you choose

           for yourself and for mankind,

Questions will be asked why, what for, never bother,

Reversals will happen,

           rivers will be frozen in the ocean of ignorance

Showers of blood may drench you mad

Tears will swell your eyes

Utter futility will break your purpose,

Veer not from your course

Waver not, Hold on! To your faith

X mas be your everyday

      as your personal birthday.

Yes ,you are a man

      deviate you nothing can,

Zing on show to the world

       you have created a new myth.

Sabita Sahu

Lifeline

When my heart knocks at the ribs

I never shudder or blink, I breathe deep

switch off my mind and change channels.

When the wind speed rises 

I blow the wind into space

to make breathing easy with the

blowing kiss of  my faraway love.

Road blocks, traffic jams, 

mountain terrains can never

make me deviate, my love makes

my pathline to his inviting soul.

Life drowns death in work and pain

death challenges life to try  again

to rain like the clouds on dry rivers

I jump all ravines to reach my fate.

When the sun disappears from the sky

the moon melts in the lava of the dark

I wait for my bud

to bloom  next spring.

Sabita Sahu

Crossing limits

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

The other night I shouted at my soulmate: You are crossing limits. Naturally she roared back: Yes, now I know my limits. I know now where you hold me; my place in your heart and in the protestation of your love!After she shut me up with a stern ‘goodnight’ I sank into a deep brown study. What has happened? What limit, I was sore about, did she cross, when she almost exploded saying reality is not an abstraction! Both reality and abstraction are without borders, boundaries; nothing is off limits in love. If love is not limited by space and time, language and culture, sense and mind, what limit did she transcend or transgress? I was nonplussed, my logic failed me to build an argument in my favour. Borders are off limits for trespassers. Laws and regulations set limits for people. Social time regulations can be understood. Auspicious moments have time limitations. Choice too operates within a framework- one cannot choose to kill another for revenge although revenge is an accepted heroic value.

Limits are always set by administration for smooth conduct of events, movements, communication and all social operation. Order, balance, harmony are maintained only when limits are honoured. Limits always presuppose a world without mystery. Logic of human perceptions is codified and simplified for smooth human process in living in the world. All limits are fixed, at times even arbitrarily, to make the world a home for man. If limits are not imposed morality will collapse and society will plunge into primeval chaos. Perhaps for this fear a Maker- Administrator of the world was invented by our ancestors called God.  All laws, limits, limitations were imaginatively made in the name of God. All freedom and all limits flew from god’s decree for keeping the world of creation orderly. Compassion, mercy, kindness, pardon, renunciation and such like values were presumed to be divine values to keep human anger, hate and violence in check. Theft of what belongs to others was/ is off limits. Murder, even self slaughter, was forbidden. All these rules and laws stemmed from a moral centre called God.

If that is true, how is it that all religions believing in the same God hate each other? Christianity and Islam, Semites and Islam, not to speak of Hindus and Muslims are always hateful of each other in spite of constitutional polities all over the world? If God is the ultimate limit of man and nature, how can the practioners of the same God’s moral laws fight between themselves? How could monotheism followed by Islam fail to recognize the gods of polytheistic Hindus? How could Christ, the Son of God be crucified...? Questions like these are not off limits to human consciousness.

This leads us to human freedom which is not necessarily a political truth. Freedom is of the spirit and it always transgresses all limits- political, ethical, social even natural. Freedom as I have said elsewhere is a defiant spirit. It does not recognise any limit anywhere. Man tries to embrace everything- nature society and the preternatural. The limits of nature have already been transgressed. Air, water, earth, sky and ether are all under attack by man’s limitless freedom. We destroy mountains, change the course of rivers, and reach Moon, Mars and now the Sun. Knowledge and our quest for knowledge has no limits. We quest for the destruction of the race too. Sapiens were never in greater danger of total annihilation than the21st century. The cyber war is about to begin. Banks are hacked; military establishments may be the next target for men who do not care for limits. The IBMs are no more a threat. A click somewhere will make all human achievements meaningless.

To return to my beginning, what limits did my love cross? Did I set any limits on love and its honey territory in my love for the only person out of the 700 billion humans? Love has no limits of body, mind, spirit or the Beyond. Any limit set by me is arbitrary and out of sync with God’s vast imagination.  Whatever limits are imposed by man for order, love sets its own limits which are limitless. Love is greater vaster and more life friendly than God. If man operates in love all borders, boundaries, rules, laws will be irrelevant. Love is the law of life and our total reality.

Hate

Mountains and valleys have no lines

to divide or claim ownership;

men draw and call them borders.

They fight for boundaries and

limits making loveliness bloody.

Maps divide the earth into countries,

kingdoms divide humans to draw

casteline and spill blood on whims.

Swords and guns,  hate and abuse

enter  our vocabulary,

love like the faded lily

falls at noon.

We killed Christ and Gandhi,

and will kill those who speak
the language of love,
let’s not make hate our identity,
now it’s time to change our DNA

else consumed shall we be

in the pyre of our own hate.

Sabita Sahu

Wait and Hope

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

Wise men counsel all despondents: wait and hope. This was the wisdom of sages and saints who saw primitive reality of flaccid resolves of people in the face of despairing events. Hunger sickness, tyranny and unpredictability of disastrous moments were meant to be tolerated with unwilled fortitude. Suffering was built into the human condition. Man was totally powerless against the elements, the turbulence of nature as well as the sword of authority. Unrecognized men, leaderless and weak could not even protest. They had only one stance: the stance of a supplicant. Mercy, kindness, pardon and such like values which assumed a superior ‘giver’or dispenser, were wisdom for the saints who had renounced social life- not sexual life- to attain this wisdom by meditation, prayer and worship. In their moments of illumination they praised renunciation as a great virtue for those who had things to give and give up: power and pelf. For the rest, that is those who failed to make both ends meet the wise advice was to “stand and wait”, the Miltonic way of serving god; or to wait for the things to happen and hope for better days: For milk and honey to rain from high above and for idyllic scenes to transform present sordidness by some divine wielder of wand.

Wait and hope experienced a change of meaning about the Industrial Revolution. By 17^th century almost all over the world man had the realization that Manna does not fall from heaven; man must work to earn his keep. Life is work and work is worship; the human time available could be wasted by waiting for things to happen - which is nonhuman. The French Revolution of 1789 also proved that waiting for any change in a despotic dispensation is foolishness. Man must catch the bull by the horn instead of waiting for the saviour to be moved by compassion with prayer. Those who waited for the marauder to stop and turn back by prayer- induced awakening of conscience simply lost their freedom and survival. The invaders never subscribed to the wisdom of wait and hope: they exploited this passive wisdom of pathological surrender to other directed wisdom.

One can wait for his love to return after 25 years mean- time hoping and praying for the paved road with green foliage growing all around for the dainty feet of his lady love to come with lithe steps. And such lovers suffer every moment with dual pain- the pain of waiting and the interminable seconds bringing emptiness and the slow emaciation of the spirit. For a modern man waiting and hoping mean idling away time doing nothing and daydreaming and fantasizing which have no logic or concrete floor to build castles on. Modern man thinks those who cannot force the moments to its critical pitch only wait and finally die as the knight in Browning’s “The Statue”. Waiting is wasting time’s allotted span to an individual by watching the hair turn grey and seasons roll by in repetitive futility.

What is hope? Hope springs eternal in the human breast- hope for what? Fulfilment of the human potential or Redemption, the unrealizable, impalpable something no mortal has remained to report? Today we wait for telephone calls; there too the passing seconds are eternities of nonexistence. We wait for appointment letters, election dates and results, the email or the plane to land or take off. Waiting for a bus or a train too is a toll on patience. At times we wait for the end of a boring film. Some people wait for the end of an infructuous life. Others wait for a war to start or a match to begin. But waiting is the most boring thing whatever the expectations. But people wait for the Helle   Bop and the Redeemer's ship to carry us to the promised land. Their cases are different as these waiters never live in this world. They are aliens in this planet. Those who hope for the things are not active players. They cannot make things happen they will simply dream of things otherworldly.

 In today’s world nothing waits for nothing. The Sun does not wait for the cyclone to cease, it rises however unseen it may be. Modern man knows there is no free lunch. There is no Alladin’s lamp to grant our wishes. No Santa Claus descends with his hoary charm to give us our hoped for things. Man today commands the robots; AI (artificial Intelligence) and biometric algorithms end our wait. Google and Alpha Zero can play games for us and make us win prizes. Machines can digitally reduce our woes and our waiting blues.

Those who wait and hope are perhaps immortals up above. They wait for man to be more responsible for fellow men and hope man to love, work and create as he believes in the pleasure of the divine.

Labyrinth

I searched the way to the sea shore,

like a shadow I walked to meet the sea

to say hello after  a century

seeing me the waves like
guilty assassins bent down,
their roar was less than a bleating.

Give me my love,

where have you hidden him?

how could you own him up

he is my treasure worthier than

yours.The sea sank down the sand
and the mud drew a labyrinth.

The air, the setting sun all 

looked grim as if ashamed.

I turned my face to the descending

darkness alone with him in my memory.

After three steps I heard- 

I am here my love to guide you,

the sea disgorged me and dried up

come let's fill it up again.

Sabita Sahu

Past Is Never Dead

 

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

Past is never dead, future is never born, the present is the reality. People say, make a clean breast of everything, the bygone is bygone, make a new beginning. Yes, we make new beginnings but the past is a lingering stream, however, dry or thin, it moves alongside the present. The now moment is born of the past moment undivorced it gives directions unconsciously. It induces comparisons, suggests adjustments and here comes in the future. Since all moments are fleeting, the events too change colours. Childhood leads to youth and youth to age. At no stage childhood is obliterated from one’s memory. Similarly youth lingers in old age and man attains second childhood- old fools are babes again wrote Shakespeare. But the new old babe too has dreams of youth. The memory has no childhood or age; it grows exapands like drops of rain in puddles, then ponds, then rivers ultimately flowing into the sea as a whole comprising undistinguished childhood, youth and age. Memory is the foundation of dreams which are for the morrow. When someone says my dreams are fulfilled, he unconsciously admits that the bud has blossomed. Imagination presupposes memory and memory holds past and future on the tablets of the present. Life is an eternal present, all stages of life, all events, dreams, plans and futurist imagination flow along a man’s changing perceptions of reality which often compels adjustments to accommodate desires.

Ask a lover for whom love is a marriage of true minds, he will narrate his love as a perpetual quest for excitement. The excitement is not a physical passion or a desire for sexual union, it is the excitement of life which is temporary, evanescent and unsubstantial: the lover makes his life of love eternal, concrete and substantial for he/ she creates a world of his/her own unique, full and vast. He has no dead past. He remembers his tiffs, quarrels, swollen faces as well as the salacious moments of sweaty togetherness. He remembers his dreams of a new beginning every moment, his imaginative constructs of his own heaven. Also remembers the quagmire of hell he had to wade through in tearful eyes: And all this in his present moment. The past is never an isolated package which can be locked up in an iron box and thrown into the sea. The sea too is memory of this planet’s life. Yesterday is not a dead page of history. Unborn tomorrow is not a new species of time. Today comprises yesterday and tomorrow. Life has all yesterday’s in sequential order, however, disorderly the sequence be, and life is a ‘present’ with changing dates, new sunrises and sunsets in different seasonal moods of the mind.

Whenever the dread of the existence shatters our present we look back in love to the mother’s arm, father leaving us at the school gate and children flirting with things, humans, birds and beasts with restoring nostalgia. So, the past is with us in moments of joy, sorrow and boredom. A desert reminds us of our backyard garden and imagination makes us dream of the Nandan Kanan with its Parijats: the desert does not get transformed immediately into a childhood garden nor to the divine flowers of never to be seen heaven. The present runs continuous as we change in form and attitude under the pressure of our reality.

Diversity is the nature of life and in this diversity we feel constancy. A being constantly searches for himself, that is renews himself but all renewals happen in time which has no independent divisions or distinct categories. Language, culture, training, the office, marriage or love- all give us disciplines which are imperatives but nothing is a categorical imperative. Life always remains unformulated, open leading to discovery of the self. The knowledge which the discoveries give an individual is never complete.  Similarly a man’s constancy too is never complete. His past his future always make his present a throbbing moment of quest. Past and future however die when the present is static, repetitive and without quest. Of course such a present means the end-call it death or cessation of the being.

Gautam the prince and Buddha the enlightened one are not totally different. Overindulgence in beauty, youth, luxury and sexual pleasure suddenly lost their charm as Buddha encountered the other realities. The past stood as a contrast to the present and the renouncement that followed was not a u turn, rather a connective stimulant to new thoughts, new discovery of the total reality. Time only leads a man to self- knowledge. It may be a foolish or futile anagnorisis but it happens. Time with its past memory and evolutionary history makes a man what he is. The hero of life is recognized in the last scene but the previous scenes only lead us to the recognition.