The blue house and Rilke

As I reread excerpts from Rilke's Letters to a young poet while also rummaging through my memory for old images from a time long ago, it amuses me how much life is entwined within poetry and fiction. The late Swedish poet, Tomas Transtromer wrote in The Blue House about the open terrain which was once a garden and now wilderness, the house resembling a child's drawing. I am intrigued by that drawing. I wonder if it will have a small red roofed house with a chimney and flower garden, with blue skies and the sun shining bright over a small pathway lined with shrubs. This is my drawing. It has fascinated me all these years, refusing to fade from my memory. Many other things have been forgotten but this house with its red roof stands fresh and surprisingly in 2D.

Transtromer writes about an amateur painting hung over the bed representing a ship with seventeen sails, rough sea and a wind which the gilded frame cannot subdue, The wind blows in my hair and sends a chill down my bones. Every inch of my body feels the cold penetrating through and freezing my soul too, as if it could literally happen. The lake seems to be quiet and reflecting my thoughts ten fold times around its tree laden bank. My mind jumbles between many images and memories of the forest trail I walked the earlier evening and the red sunset ceases to set. I realise how fickle our imagination is compared to nature's wide beauty. It's almost impossible and hard as I try, I cannot take all this beauty in my eyes. The moment I take a view and close my eyes, I am tempted to freeze that second forever. Photographs cannot do justice to Toranmal's natural beauty. A camera is too lame of an instrument to capture something so visually captivating.

As I keep reading and switching between The Blue House and Rilke's verse, I feel like life is nothing but the description that portrays a motor engine running afar somewhere along the summer horizon and inspirations from nature. All of this can fit in a painting and in a memory tile, albeit if one decides to keep the two separate.

The grassy woodlands in rural Maharashtra with deep valleys and small rivers running through them are worth in gold for their raw beauty.

The landscapes are devoid of the colour seen in the European countryside but every single inch of land is rich with its varied hues of cultivated crops dancing in the wild sunshine.The red, yellow and orange of the sun in the valleys above the mountains invited me to join them for an endless melange of poetry and soul searching. I longed for the warmth of the bonfire and cosy comfort of sleep.

Such trips bring some sentimental longing in my nomad spirit. Yes, I feel like one at times. I love Arthur Rimbaud's words that say,

In the blue summer evenings, I will go along the paths,

And walk over the short grass, as I am pricked by the wheat:

Daydreaming I will feel the coolness on my feet.

I will let the wind bathe my bare head.

I will not speak, I will have no thoughts:

But infinite love will mount in my soul;

And I will go far, far off, like a gypsy,

Through the country side-joyous as if I were with a woman.

I am that woman who longs for the wind in her hair and a silence through the pathways she treads, in the hope of finding her real purpose and destination, someday.