soliloquies of a footloose
‘twas perchance that we got to know of Chenap valley, which we did as our original plans went awry at the last moment… tucked in ‘twixt religious fervours, highways and hydropower more hedonistic that utilitarian, and the never-ending scrapes of JCB for last-mile connectivity, ‘tis purported to be a quieter alternative to Valley of Flowers, …
monsoons bring their own unique romance to the mountains, neither comparable to the pure white vistas of winter nor quite like the salubriousness of spring or autumn… the summers preceding them are not really scorching but still do tend to get on one’s nerves that the rains pacify, beginning with the petrichor and then moving …
there are walks in the mountains while hiking that one underestimates, naïve enough not to pay heed to the illusions of a simple way up wild gorges… the day elongates proportionally with the trail, disaggregated into phases that seem like days unto themselves, each phase anchored to its own particular memory… there’s a brief period …
Musings on clouds in meadows, treks across Western Himalaya…
Musings on Shiva in Himalayan contexts…
Chortens are one of those religious structures that are universally revered, a harbinger of constructive contemplation – one that leads towards inner peace through reminiscent journeys – these trapezoids stacked over one another and topped with a crown are but Buddha posing himself they say… a structural representation of different stages of his mortal journey… …
Wistfulness is a state of poetic realms, tinges of sweet sorrow sprinkled over the cocoon of contentment… so it feels rather amusing when one manifests it on to animals (in the guise of anthropomorphism) at first, but it makes at sense at times, when formal discourses on solutions to the evolution of evolution and genes …
Butterflies go deep, quite deep, maybe simply on the dint of the remarkable transitions they display that for millennia have flummoxed the best of minds… the Greeks and Indians ascribed the transformation akin to the transmigration of the human soul… palingenesis… Zhuang Zhou scratched his head, perplexed with this butterfly dream that seems to snowball …
Isolation in mountains, unlike those of confined spaces that breeds restlessness, is steeped in contentment… musings on mountains and solitude…
Shepherds, like cowboys, are a romanticized lot, maybe it stems from the fact that it remains one of the oldest subsistence activities of the civilized homo sapien, something that has stood the test of time and remain unscathed, come war or peace… it is quite baffling that an occupation so resilient has been looked down …