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Nature has the power to bring us back to ourselves. I seemed to have wandered far away and God knows how I wish for stillness again! That was the idea why despite the not-so-good feeling within I jumped up to my own idea of finding a long winding trail and losing my way to nature, and finding the way to myself.

The Lexington reservoir in Los Gatos, California, had always piqued my interest as I passed it by many a times but never stopped to just stare. We parked and started walking along the road. But the water beneath the hill called to me. So I started walking down to it. There wasn’t a path but I wanted to find one still, and once I reached the water, I wanted to go along the lake before going back up. There are always footholds one can find, I realized, no matter how unchartered the territory. Life is like that too. It may seem like you’ll fall off, but there are always ways to get by and still find the track of your dreams. Yet it’s not just life and it’s situations that stump us, so it isn’t enough to just escape them, I thought to myself. Even as I kept walking ahead, but my mind kept chasing me down with memories, fears and frustrations. And even though I kept myself from falling off physically despite the precarious walk, my own mind stuff kept pushing me off from feeling better.

It is the lopsided interest in the world that the mind is caught up in and makes us our own captive. So we are never alone even by the still waters and among lofty mountain peaks. Was there an escape then ?

I felt like giving up!

Just then I remembered something they always say about the present moment and how it holds the key to our freedom. But I never quite understood it until something brought it home to me right then.

Well of course the reality is what it is and what is present right now— it can not be made to vanish or become less by anything that is not present. Why let the mind get hijacked by the past and the future. I am here right now and that’s a fact. The ideas of the mind, memories from the past or anxieties about the future are the fiction. Although they seem to have a life of their own, but they are not real and present like the water in the lake, the fresh air of the mountains or the pebbles beneath my feet I walk on. They are physical and tangible. So while the thoughts happen, I let myself know and ‘believe’ that my reality still isn’t that. My reality is this moment. And in this moment I’m free to walk the trail. The mind stuff cannot negate my reality and steal my happiness and freedom.

All at once I found my mind freely roaming through the valley, gliding over the water in the lake and over the grassy meadowy slopes and raising up to touch the skies above. That’s the hike I had wanted. It helped me come back to myself.

I was struggling with chores, relationships, and feelings; just like many of us. And that’s what we call life. And we live it like the Battle of Kalinga. Feeling soft and cute and fresh, is generally not the story.

Neither was I feeling like that too.

Then a sudden trip to India got on my cards. I felt choice-less while having a choice. Now on hindsight, I know why. Some freedom was pending. And I had to get that.

I went to India. It was supposedly the land of my dreams, that I had been deprived of because of circumstances. It was perfect in its own way like it always had been. But my heart seemed away this time around.

Life had a totally different feel, look and rhythm. It wasn’t my life. Yet it was still life but it was simply a different setting. Even as my mind couldn’t get around it, and it felt bizarre as if an unreal scene had been planted in my real story of life, I did have to accept this part of the world and time in my life as true as my life back home.

However, it still felt untrue somewhere. Because it suddenly had none of those issues, fights and things to do like I did back home. I was suddenly expelled from the humdrum of life. But that made the life back home look unreal now, if India was the truth, by virtue of me being there at that moment in time. I was confused. Something was the matter with my vision of truth or the truth must be something else altogether.

Since it was a trip after all, it ended and I returned home which is in a very different country, time zone, and with a very different feel and style of living than India.

I had missed home. I realized. There is no dream to be realized away from the reality of the present moment. When the present moment is realized fully, it becomes that dream you’d been dreaming to come alive.

So, anyway, I had been away from home and now coming back made home feel very different and new. It looked too good to be true. A newness had dawned on it suddenly. I couldn’t believe that in a short stretch of time and in the same lifetime and on the same planet, life could be so different and yet perfect in its own way in every place.

And then it struck like lighting — it’s all a pretty play. It’s untrue while being true in essence only.

Life is not made up of concrete realities and houses that can not be changed and are rigid, but it’s a series of pretty doll houses lining the roads on either sides as I drive my car through. They are there to be enjoyed and felt for their beauty and softness, and we walk through them and life like a whiff of cloud that simply wafts through the skies.

However, reality being still away from the doll house like life and truly being the inner feeling and quality that supplies beauty and joy to the physical reality or makes the physical world seem harsh as the case may be. Of course, perceiving it as pretty being the best case if we are intelligent enough to understand.

Because, it’s perceiving the outer world as the ultimate reality that makes it hard and harsh to deal with and life feels like an unchangeable reality set in stone that one must come to terms with like having to swallow a piece of rock.

But if it were to be a doll house then life would be a play to be enjoyed and not fretted about. And we’d know and nurture the inner quality which is the truth “ultimate”, and live in the physical world in a way that will supply it with joy and life.

We’d focus then on our own selves and inside us, rather than dealing with what’s outside. While its the highest way of living and the crux of human existence and the purpose of life realized. But once gained, understood and learnt, then life seems pretty as a doll house.

We then live and enjoy life like it were a play than having to deal with life. And life becomes a journey of learning rather than a game of profits and losses. It’s a pretty cloud that can shower you with coolness, but it’s still temporary in a way that’s not heavy and not to be worried about.

I look in the mirror, as if I see my self in the mirror of my own self — and I see a beauty waving back at me. She’s gorgeous, spontaneous, intuitive, loving, and hearty like the one that could steal hearts.

And yet there’s a moroseness felt deep down in her — as if something is stopping her beauty, inhibiting her trueness from showing up. That abandon in her reflection and that charm that would stop you in your tracks to pay heed to her, is but caged somewhere.

But the reflection in the mirror and the mirror of her mind proves it otherwise. The beauty is right there — within and now the mirror helps her see it without.

She knows. She is love. She is pretty. She is an antiquity – made more gorgeous and deep by her travails.

She is beautiful.

I am beautiful