Plateful of Flowers

When someone is sick and is admitted into a nursing home or hospital, it is customary for friends and neighbors, to carry a “Get well soon” card with a bouquet of flowers. As I am recuperating from a bout of influenza, I received a bouquet of flowers, a plateful of e-flowers. Nature’s pure gift, unalloyed, groomed by rain and shine, and a little bit of human care! It is not only a feast to the eyes, but it also brings the best of nature to our doorsteps. The seasonal flowers seldom fail, even if the monsoon rains fail. They follow nature’s pre-designated cycle, and come what may, they are there with their beauty and fragrance.

The rain-soaked flowers sitting leisurely on the plate, holding each other making the best circle of friendship that can ever be imagined or re-created, is a sight that can transport us to an altogether different realm, if only we are look into the blossoms. Unity in diversity is what they uphold, by mingling with flowers of different shades, all adding to the cosmic rhythm, that the universe is still safe and secure. But don’t jump too much into their short-span of life; it is human beings who evaluate the quality of our lives by the number of years we have lived, not so for nature.

Is it not a wonderful thing to contemplate how nature has a different kind of life-guide than the human beings? The birds and insects, trees and shrubs all of them have a million stories to tell the human beings, if only we have the ears to listen to them. Today we listen to what these blossoms staring at me tell, or wish to tell at this moment! We don’t need to keep our ears to listen to them, but keep the doors of our hearts ajar, so that their words may enter into us, and transform the way we look at life at large. Once they touch us, we may look at nature with different eyes.

I am fascinated by the instance in the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjuna pleads with Lord Krishna that he might receive His cosmic vision. Krishna chides Arjuna saying that with human eyes he cannot behold his eternal, celestial beauty, and so He offers his disciple a third eye, with which he would be able to have the cosmic vision of the Lord. That is what we all need today, to look at the footprints of the maker in all that is around us; then even a blade of grass, or a still, stationary tree may have a message for us, what they are and what we are.

It is time for me to pass this plate on, so that the joy of beholding their beauty may not stop with me, but become contagious, very much like the swine flu, the H1N1 virus, so that after a few years, or decades or even centuries, we may have a humanity which is in close contact with nature and her bounty. On that day, there will not be a plateful of flowers, but only nature gathering plateful of human beings around her chest, treasuring them as if they were her very own. Is that not what many religions call Paradise!