Tree and the T-Rex

There are moments in life that can’t be recreated. Moments that just happen. Moments that delight you and make you feel that life, after all, does carry some meaning. When you smell the trees and get strokes of cool, comely wind on your face and cheeks.

As monsoon season commences every year, the first few showers are nothing less than bliss. They are relief from scorching heat, and the weather in which clouds keep the sky closed for hours on end, and sunlight comes sporadically in evenings and mornings, is just awesome and something worth living for.

It was one such evening, a few days ago, while I stood near a parapet grill. We live on the second floor, and when you stand near this balcony grill, you feel as if you are a lot closer to the clouds and the sky. Just twenty or thirty feet above the ground, and you are already almost touching the sky!

Now let me describe the scene I was witnessing. Just as a side note, I had seen some clip from the movie Jurassic Park that morning, and the scenes had been replaying on the back of my mind. I wasn’t hence surprised when I saw a certain group of clouds forming a perfect, roaring T-Rex at one corner of the sky. Clouds and stars – these are two things that can give you almost any shape in the world. Some see in the same group of stars a simple, commonplace dipper, and some, amazingly, see a fierce, stood-up-on-hind-legs bear!

Anyhow, it was a T-Rex that I saw. The clouds were quite stationary that evening hence I could expect it to stay in sight for quite some time. There was a yellowish tint to all of them, as Sun was behind one of those groups. From yellow it slowly turned to orange and soon to pinkish. The change was spectacular.

As extra frosting, there was that cool wind which comes with such weather. Now wind comes in different flavours too. Sometimes it carries some heavy, unbearable smell and moisture which brings lethargy. But today it carried some scent brought from some rose-fields. No air conditioner in the world could rival its soothing coolness. The same wind rustled through the leaves of a tree at a distance, just as it combed through my sideburns. Maybe that tree was where from where it was issuing. For a split second, I felt as if I was out of my body and some beautiful cycle was in progress. My nose exhaled air that danced across to the tree the underside of whose leaves breathed it. As a return, they gave out air that was pleasant to me and was balmy and sweet. It was perfect cycle, as if we were complete in ourselves and needed no third thing in the world.

At this point, I felt as if the T-Rex smiled at the thought that in the bilateral exchange, I was forgetting the power, the medium, the expanse, space and openness, which was making the magic happen.