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Musings
The
Construction Site
You may call it a quirk of destiny or some vagary of time, which brought me to this place far removed from my roots. There must have been a reason for this transition but I preferred to visualize it as an effect having a definite cause somewhere in the labyrinthine recesses of time. Though I did find myself distanced away from my roots yet I refused to recognize or accept it as an uprooting. I had always tried to visualize in it the movement of the farthest shoot of a tree that keeps on moving away and away from the roots and yet draws its sustenance from them only. Just like the lonely leaf emerging on that farthest shoot to find it occupying a miniscule part of the yonder boundless space, I also came to identify this segment of the vast surface of mother Earth as the site for an abode for my family and myself. This appeared to me as a modicum of a continuous movement manifest on an omnipresent, all pervading, all sustaining, interminable canvas without a beginning and an end.
In the ensuing period, we kept on accumulating days, months and years but the site remained just a piece of conversation till that particular point in time when we began enclosing the space surrounding our site between walls and roofs to carve out a home for ourselves. Amidst the chanting of hymns and renderings of prayers we sought favors from mother Earth for her blessings. In our prayers we beseeched her forgiveness too as some destruction was bound to accompany the construction that was about to commence on our site.
We must have destroyed a part of the playing field of some young children, the grazing greens for their cattle heads and the plough fields of some unknown farmer's family. I bowed my head in reverence and sought their forgiveness too as the excavation started. They must have moved on to some other pastures. Wasn't this transition in their lives also just a small link in that perpetual, unbroken sequence of events and happenings called life?
It has been an almost incessant activity since then. People who and have been hitherto just some unknown faces in the vast multitude of humanity came closer and gathered to associate with us, listen to us, appreciate our concepts and requirements, analyze our dreams and began advising, assisting and contributing to our efforts. Materials dug out from deep inside the Earth and ferried from unheard of and unseen places were being reconstituted, rearranged and repositioned to give a tangible shape to the concepts and thoughts, which used to appear as mere geometric lines on large sheets of paper.
A consistent flux, a perpetual movement regulates and directs all that is manifest around us as evidence of life. At certain points in time the moved and their movement may appear as outwardly different from those at some other points but the uniformity of this eternal movement and the permanence of its sustaining medium are in essence the truth of all that appears to change at an amazingly regulated pace.
And I wondered at the mystery of the eternal continuity. Hasn't it always been like this only? Construction and destruction had always manifested together as two phases of a continuous process sustained on the substratum of existence. Each event that we see as having been completed makes us realize the futility of searching the meanings of an end and a beginning from amongst all that gets constructed and destroyed all around us. This reminded me of the perpetual trinity of creation, sustenance and dissolution appearing on the vast canvas of life on Earth and elsewhere also in the entire universe revealed and at times not revealed to the human mind. An eternal, unbroken filament ran through all that appeared as waft and warp of a woven matrix that sustained all that appeared to us as our world of mind and matter.
–
Dr.
Vidur Jyoti
August 12, 2001
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