The best spent $375 ..

Sydenham River, Ontario

This year when Ontario Nature organized a campaign to raise funds to buy and create Sydenham River Nature Reserve, its 25th nature reserve, we made a small donation of $375 for the campaign.

Though the donation was nothing but a tiny drop in comparison with the $860,000 needed to acquire this property, I felt a great uplifting rush when I read the email from Caroline Schultz early this December that this dream had became a reality!! Sydenham River is now permanently etched in my heart and I cannot wait to go see her next spring.

Tagore: Day after day, you fill with love, life and song ...

Tagore

No words can capture the sublime beauty of Tagore’s songs. They must be savoured in quiet solitude. The more one listens to his songs, the feelings go deeper and deeper and eventually touches the very depth of ones being. In this simple song, the great poet meditates on that eternal power that fills us day after day with renewed life, love and songs ..

Nishidin mor parane priyotomo mamo

Kato na bedona diye barota pathale 

Bharile chitto mamo nitya tumi preme prane gane hai

Thaki arale

Meaning:  

Day after day in my life,  O beloved of mine..

You send messages in the form of pain..

and fill my mind, ever with love, vitality and song ..

Alas, you remain concealed.. 

Rupa Ganguly's rendition of this song is unparalled ..

Less of the material, more of the intangible ..

The quest for a meaningful life will inevitably lead us away from the material, drawing us more and more towards the intangible treasures of the universe. Knowledge, love, friendship, music, truth, solitude, beauty .. none of these can be touched, they can only be experienced. Hellen Keller so rightly said "The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart."

To cultivate and nourish them daily makes life so much more meaningful and fulfilling, unlike material pursuits which always leaves us feeling unsatisfied and wanting for more of the next in thing.

“The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less;  - Annie Dillard

Embracing the Spirit of Sabbath ..

Burnt from too much work and too many activities over the last several months, I have come to realize the great need for quiet and rest. Too much importance is given to work and too little to rest.

I have embraced the restoring spirit of Sabbath in our lives. A day to withdraw from all outwardly activities and turn the mind and attention inwards and homewards. A day for rest, quiet reflection and for noble aspirations towards a simple, moral and intellectual life.

In his article titled Sabbath for the NY Times, Dr Oliver Sacks captures the spirit of Sabbath, its "utter peacefulness and remoteness from worldly concerns", "of a stopped world, a time outside time". Sabbath is about "achieving a sense of peace within oneself. Sabbath, the day of rest, .. when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest."

Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop. - Ovid

Rest belongs to the work as eyelids to the eyes. - Tagore

Song is the ultimate offering ...

|| Japakoti gunam dhyanam - dhyanakoti gunolayas

   Laya koti gunam ganam - ganat parataram nahi || 

Meaning: Meditating just once is worth chanting verses a million times.

Being in the state of divine union once is worth meditating a million times.

A song sung in true harmony is worth being in the state of divine union a million times

There is nothing greater than song. 

True songs and poems originates from the bliss of the singer who is in a prolonged state of divine union. The saints and seers in the Indian sub continent sang innumerable songs of love, devotion and beauty. These songs form the basis of classical music in India. Singing is therefore considered the ultimate form of worship. 

"Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy" - Ludwig van Beethoven

Three days of painting ..

The Canadian landscape and seasons have captured my heart in a warm embrace. Sometimes, I try to find ways to express this beauty in my writings, but words always fall short in expressing ones feelings. Painting is the way I choose to express my spiritual reverence for mother nature.

Plien Air painting with John Pryce

I had stopped painting since my favourite instructor John Stuart Pryce moved to the Canadian west coast. I haven't felt the desire to learn from any one else.  I know for certain that John is whom I want to learn from and it is his style that I want to emulate. What is unique about John's style, is the brilliant luminosity and the play of light that brings his paintings to life.

So this fall, I jumped at the rare opportunity to spend three glorious days painting en-plien air with John. Three paintings are what I have to show for it and the satisfaction of having quenched a deep thirst.

A Kinship with Trees ..

The trees .. I have gotten to know them well over the last few years ... the ashes, aspens, birches, beeches, oaks, maples, walnut, hemlocks, pines, firs and spruces. From far, I recognize the white pine from their weather beaten forlorn silhouettes, the quaking aspen from its chandelier like fluttering leaves, the birches stand out with the pure white of their bark and I feel a strong kinship with these trees, a feeling so hard to verbalize.

Trees are sanctuaries that preach the ancient law of life .. 

Hermann Hesse's profoundly beautiful words captures what trees mean to us and to life!! 
"For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness."