Redeemed From Megalomania

I looked at  the blue expanse

That stretched wide in front of me,

In its never ending eternal glory.

Waves of relief washed over me;

I was filled with peace and tranquility.

Thank god, I was still tiny, and 

My troubles 'n' tribulations still petty.

The weight of the world and its

Complicated affairs could go take a walk.

Given all my obsession with the 

Minuscule cosmos I surrounded myself with,

I was still but a drop, nothing but a drop.

(Yes the ocean would be impoverished without me,

but that loss would amount to barely a drop.)

Oh, that feeling  - humbling, yet so comforting;

How exhilarating that I can surely take a moment

To do nothing, but simply sit back and enjoy,

As the other drops play their part...

Tequila Sunsets

I was thinking what better way to welcome March than post some of the last of the sunset fiestas of the season. Soon it will get warm and then hot, and hotter. The skies will become languid and I'll miss this splash of colors at twilight.

"Splendor of ended day floating and filling me, 

Hour prophetic, hour resuming the past, 

Inflating my throat, you divine average, 

You earth and life till the last ray gleams I sing...

...Wonderful to depart!

Wonderful to be here!... 

...Wonderful how I celebrate you and myself 

How my thoughts play subtly at the spectacles around! 

How the clouds pass silently overhead! 

How the earth darts on and on! and how the sun, moon, stars, dart on and on!...

...O amazement of things--even the least particle!

O spirituality of things!... 

...I sing to the last the equalities modern or old,

I sing the endless finales of things,... 

...O setting sun! though the time has come,

I still warble under you, if none else does, unmitigated adoration." 

[Excerpts from Song at Sunset by Walt Whitman]

"In My Sky At Twilight"

Leisure days have given me one more boon - the time and space to watch the setting sun. Arizona skies are at their charming and vibrant best around this time of the year, especially during sunsets. And the best part - I do not have to go far to soak in the beauty of the golden ball melting into the horizon - it comes to me, right at my patio.

A cup of hot chocolate, gentle soulful music (Louis Armstorng, Beatles, Golden Oldies of Bollywood) in the background, my camera on the side, and in my hands - an anthology of poems through the eras, especially the Romantics - Wordsworth, Yeats, Keats, Shelley, and perhaps the greatest 20th century poet - Neruda...And our brightest star descending behind the mountains - yes, sometimes, life is truly beautiful and pristine...

There are days, when even through the clouds and the haze, the light fuzzes through, and I echo Pablo Neruda...

"I have seen from my window

the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops."

And then, there are days, when the sky is less dramatic, picturesque nevertheless, and Wordsworth does perfect justice to the scape...

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, 

Hath had elsewhere its setting, 

And cometh from afar: 

Not in entire forgetfulness, 

And not in utter nakedness, 

But trailing clouds of glory do we come 

From God, who is our home: 

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!"

But even on days as above, the clouds introduce their own theatrics...

The inscrutable workmanship of nature that Wordsworth eulogized is so believable when you see the canvas spread out in hues you could only imagine...

"Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows

Like harmony in music; there is a dark

Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles

Discordant elements, makes them cling together

In one society. How strange, that all

The terrors, pains, and early miseries,

Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused

Within my mind, should e'er have borne a part,

And that a needful part, in making up

The calm existence that is mine when I

Am worthy of myself! Praise to the end!"

And when the musings of the painter become denser, you really wonder if it is worthiness, destiny or sheer luck that you could witness these sights...

And the words of Pablo Neruda resound in your being when you see the progression of blues and yellows to turquoises and ambers to a burst of cyans, sapphires, crimsons, mahagonies, carmines, corals, auburns, scarlets, vermilions...colors that you cannot count and name...

"My soul is an empty carousel at sunset."

...All this, "in my sky at twilight".