It's close to midnight, raining, the tenants living upstairs are creating some ruckus and here I am, pondering over my disastrous cupcake kitchen adventure from the evening. My head hurts badly with a splitting pain throughout my temples and perhaps, I need to pay a visit to my ENT doctor tomorrow. Each year, at least once I suffer from these splitting headaches which are usually only warning me about my ear infections. I am a very healthy person. I seldom miss appointments or work assignments or social commitments due to sickness. But that's because I am really scared of illness and the pain that follows it. As a kid, most of my doctor visits were due to ear infections only. For the past couple of years, I have been relatively healthy and fit with no major or minor sicknesses ever, not even cold or fever that warranted a visit from me to the doctor.
Last Sunday, I was travelling through a mountain pass in my car and happened to witness a magical moonlit night that seemed to guide us through the dark. It's a very literary setting but when this happens, I instantly remember J.R.R.Tolkein's words- "May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out." Something about the stars on a night journey makes me feel assured about the various things in life that remain unsorted and unsolved in the moment for me. When I went on a trek last month, we climbed halfway up to the base village of the hilltop and stopped to look over the sprawling city lights in the distance. With the dark on the mountain pass, the lights looked like stars on earth to me. The night sky was clear enough to shine upon our ascend uphill, bathing each stone in its silvery light. I felt an overwhelming surge of gratitude to be alive and witnessing that moment there. Never had I ever felt such a rush of ecstatic unadulterated joy before. Simple things are priceless indeed.
Each night as I return home, I am accompanied by a small sliver of star cluster (that's what it looks to me!), and I walk albeit in a daze since summer nights are clear in my town. The pollution levels are controlled here and the skies are clear most nights for the stars to be visible. My imaginative kid self-used to weave stories about people who travelled on stars in their afterlife. Because they were so far away, I felt an acute attraction towards them. I loved spreading glitter on my clothes, greeting cards and just about the entire house in a bid to be closer to them. Kids have such a high enthusiasm for achieving the unattainable. Also, the sky holds an immeasurable attraction since space exploration is all about delving into the unknown. I always considered the moonlight to be a special sign of all that was special and magical as a kid.
Stargazing is one of the nicest activities us humans could indulge our time and energy in. It's an amusing miracle to watch. I have lost count of the number of nights I've spent in my childhood through teens looking from my bedroom window unto the endless dark skies, seizing up stars in my eyes. It made me believe in the happiness and new spirits that engulfed my every waking moment then. Years later, in architecture school, I came across Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Nights painting along with the Don Mclean rendition of Starry, starry nights and it gave me further impetus to continue my interest in stars and family of galaxies and the constellations with its various nebulae that dot the outer space. I remember being so obsessed and intrigued with the mere words moon, stars, galaxies that I scoured literature for anything related to it. My first Somerset Maugham novel was, of course, The Moon and sixpence, next was Antoine de Saint-Exupery's memoir Wind, Sand and Stars. These forces of nature are utterly fascinating and we are lucky to indeed bear a witness to them all. Something incredibly dreamy about the night catches my fancy even today. I can hear the loud tick-tock of the clock overhead on the wall, along with an occasional low buzz of traffic on the street. The wind whooshes past a lone plum tree in my vicinity. I can see and feel the night calm and it doesn't even feel creepy. Instead gives out a soothing vibe of calm and harmony all over the place. It's my cue to wither away in this beautiful dark moonless night. May peace be upon every living being. Amen.
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