Silence is pure beauty
Beauty without imperfection
A space between sounds
A deadness between noise
Quiet, you can hear it, yet you can't hear anything at all
So you could say silence is nothing
A nothing like me
Nothing is there and so nothing there is to judge
I wish I was silence, so no one would judge me……Sunny Sethi
(Image: www.pavelsmid.eu)
I virtually chased everything I saw – from a dazzling yellow-black striped fish to a mudskipper with a wing-like fin; from a tiny red long-clawed crab – which moved at a Charlie Chaplinsque speed - to a scorpion which I had, at the first glance, mistaken for a crab.
“Can’t you push it out of its hole? May be, you can pour a bit of mineral water. It’s acclimatised to salinity and might just find mineral water, for a change, interesting,” Ajay said. He was our man behind the camera.
I tried. In vain though. It just wouldn’t leave. I had to virtually push the scorpion out using a small twig. The little thing hurried out of its shelter and headed towards a small stream and rolled over many times on its way down. Looking at its plight, I realized why human beings have emerged as the biggest encroachers and Mother Nature, the best teacher notwithstanding how badly we have treated her. The scorpion, as I noticed, had found a new burrow for itself in no time.
I spotted cone-shaped shells. Oh! There are so many around here, I told myself. A villager, curious at what the camera crew was doing at the spot for the last one hour, corrected me: “These are snails, and are alive.” I literally jumped in the air. Damn it! I realized I was standing on so many of them with my shoes on. They must have been crushed, I thought. They were not. Under pressure of my body weight, they were pressed deep into the mud though.
“But how do they live around here without water, on this dry muddy surface. The sea is about a few kilometers from this spot?” I asked. “It can live inside its shell for days together and comes out when tidal waves flush the area,” he explained. Unless of course, the snails were crushed by someone like me.
** ** **
Before you start wondering why I am up to all this, I must tell you what I was doing. I went back to the wild with an environment documentary film team. For full five days, I worked with them looking for the smaller details that make Nature so beautiful. Like the crab, the scorpion and the snails, the sensational mangrove species that withstand such high levels of salinity and tidal inundation to protect the coasts, so crucial to the human beings.
And of course, the mudskippers which look like big-sized larva. They kept jumping on the shoreline of the river like mad. They are said to be more active on wet, moist land than in water. I am even told this amphibious fish species was among the first aquatic organisms to have come in contact with land. And boy! They enjoy being on land even if they are a fish, as if kids playing on a beach in the afternoon sun.
I had always loved exploring the wild but this one was terrific since I was watching everything so closely. For the film crew, it was probably part of their job; for me, it was learning. I had a 6 am to 6 pm work-hour (God! That was back-breaking although I never dropped tired) during the five-day shoot and had to trek long distance inside the dense mangrove forests, along the coastline, travelled in a large brackish water lagoon for hours on end as the sun beat down hard.
We shot a range of floral and fauna species that make the wetland ecosystems – that’s what the documentary film was about – tick, came across some real large animals like the salt water crocodiles and even the smallest ones like the colourful beetle.
I felt I had gone back to the classroom. Of the real kind.
(Yes, I did tan my skin in the process and no one can recognise me now. Not even me.)
(Image: Aquarium of Pacific)
I always wondered why connecting with nature was sometimes so easy yet the bond so strong.
My weekend took me to a place which virtually is nestled amidst rivers and their creeks. Across the miles are dense mangrove forests where I could almost hear the rustle of every leaf, chirping of every bird and even my heart beating away silently.
And in the swirling waters of the rivers and in those mudflats were a few hundred salt water crocodiles. A thousand five hundred and seventy two was what the latest census said. Some of these reptiles weigh over 1,000 kgs each, measuring more than 20 ft in length. The GuinnessBook of Records says it's where world's largest croc lives. At times you could forget that these are nature's most menacing animals and can kill a man with just one swing of their tails. They have, in the past. But that's beside the point because men have killed more; more of their own tribe and that of others too. Basking in the sun, the crocodiles were so much at peace with themselves and with nature.
Such was the tranquility that I did not seem to realise where I stayed did not even have electricity supply. The night was never more dark and the sky, never so much star-studded. I did not want to come back.
Someone had so famously said: You are wrong if you think that the joy of life comes principally from the joy of human relationships. God's place is all around us, it is in everything and in anything we can experience.
And about connecting with nature, I guess, we all belong to it and will go back to it someday. It, therefore, is so easy to connect to and the reason the bond is so strong.
(Image: Shamim Qureshy)
Some people feel like they don't deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past - Christopher McCandless
