This is my canvas
On seeking inspiration
Wait! Just Listen is a weekly Sunday newsletter on living a purposeful and meaningful life, in a digitised world of opinion polarisation, gratuitous commentary and click-bait. Subscribe with one-click to receive my musings right in your inbox. If you want access to topics and recordings more attuned to the craft of writing and ideation, do consider opting for the paid version of this newsletter.
I’m walking my 6-year old black and white Maltese on a muggy evening feeling the full wrath of the sun on my skin. As I meander through the side-streets of this quaint leafy suburb, portraying the hardiness of a well-adapted local, a trivial detail catches my attention. The sunlight this evening has filtered through the leaves forming a series of tiny, overlapping circles on the ground, each of which is an image of the sun, in a glistering orange tinge. There is something immensely humbling in seeing the majestic wonders of the cosmos casually expressed, without any fanfare, as part of mother nature’s own - a reminder of how the transcendental is often closer than we imagine.
Within minutes, mother nature as capricious as she is, assumes a different tact.
The blue sky changes to grey, speedily becoming more dusky, and a cold unprocessed fear seizes upon everything earthly. Birds, with terrified cries, fly bewildered for a moment, and then silently seek their nests in urgent desperation. The mimosas on the sidewalk close their delicate petals, as a sense of hushed suspense deepens with the sudden darkness. The air remains motionless; perhaps a show of sympathy from the Gods above. A low roll of thunder mutters ominously on the horizon. The rumbling slowly gathers momentum in a progressively frenzied cadence culminating in an explosion of rain.
On the park across, a chain of everyday scenes lurch into a sudden stillness. A group of kids playing cricket abandon their bats and look up at the sky in seeming bewilderment. Young lovers seated on a bench ahead, giving free reign to passion on a humid evening, pause and glance to the heavens. A little boy chasing butterflies halts in his tracks, his countenance betraying his will to appear brave.
Each of us, including my beady-eyed Maltese, became subjects of nature’s playful experiment, experiencing the vertigo of banality and transcendence. The feeling of being in control and indifferent to our surroundings in one moment and then disenfranchised and unsettled in the next, succumbing to nature’s unpredictable temperament.
In that brief moment of transition, from light to darkness, I felt an overwhelming sense of community - a sacred thread of connectedness to fellow beings. I was part of a crowd that saw the world the same way I did with the same deep seated concerns and questions. Each of us transfixed by nature’s haunting beauty hidden underneath the mask of daily ordinariness, at the cusp of a virulent summer storm. And in that slice of time, all the tragedies of daily life, the latent loneliness, the inexorable foreboding, unuttered secrets and yearnings, stillborn promises and unspoken fears become insignificant afterthoughts, shadows of their former selves under the redemptive hymn of nature’s majestic presence.
As philosopher John Muir once wrote, “the universe is an infinite storm of beauty”. You can focus on a landscape and see it peppered with things — trees, wildlife, clouds, hills and valleys — which have no voice except the ones you give them in your imagination. Everything that shines under nature’s omniscient magic wand is a source of inspiration; transforming brutish reality into timeless hope; a merciless cynic into a bourgeoning optimist; a child’s dreams into an everlasting song.
We are the central protagonists in nature’s beguiling canvas. To deny it would be to deny the consequence of our own humanity.