Madness

There are two sides to every story, or so it is said. Maybe there are just as many stories as there are people to interpret it. Truth is everyone interprets a story based on their personal experiences and individual moral indignation. Nothing is fixed or fully interpretative.  There are so many layers to the human psyche and perhaps just as many layers to every human behavior and interaction. There is no right or wrong, or is there? What is it that compels us to look for the sanity in this world? With so many people, so many observances, what makes us think we can control what we call “reality”?

What could be more near absolute madness than looking for the sanity in a mad mad world! Everything around is a lot of chaos that we tend to file in components and sections within our minds trying to make sense of it. Sections for everything, family, work, bills, duties, the law and love. Somehow we keep it all together, watching, observing and copying those before us and those around us. It’s a copy paste scheme, this sanity business. As long as we seem just the same we can get away with our inner madness. Templated forms of existence are the sanity that we aspire to.

What is it that we truly hide behind the closed doors of our minds, behind the veils of conformity? Why is it that so often the raving reality in our minds is nothing more than insanity to the world? The oft-repeated rituals within our communication, our lives, our celebrations and our mourning seen as sane. Would it be utter madness if my inner interpretation of mourning was completely different from that of the rest of the world?

Sanity is nothing more than a group of people unanimously agreeing to something to be correct and sane. It will be their sanity, if someone within said group deviates, they are insane. Another group not in sync with their interpretation would likely not think their interpretation as madness of course and vice a versa. It is nothing more than organized madness, mob theory. So why is it that we need conformity, to keep the sanity, create distances or to just because we are afraid of the depths and craziness of our own minds? Lest we actually be “seen”. We wear veils everyday of our lives, to hide the true beings within us.

We hide our inner beings because we know no one will accept this inner being, not because the world and its stark sanity cannot endure it but because we are surrounded by a swarm of crazies who work hard to keep it sane, which is in actuality the biggest insanity in the world. Pretending to be sane, in a chaotic world, what could be more insane?

So keep hiding my fellow crazies, the world is too insane to understand our madness!

Fly with Me

You say I am mad
I say you’re deaf
I dance to the music
You don’t hear it
My soul follows it

You draw lines
I erase all mine
Fortress of walls
You call it a Palace
I call it prison

My Palace
is under the sun,
feel it in the breeze
where the music lives
and nightingale sings

Free and unbound
my soul flies far and wide
the wind under my wings
I see it now, why can’t you?

O self imprisoned soul!
set yourself free,
hear the music
fly with me!

– Khushbo

My Saviour

Years I waited
Tears I cried

Hope stood still
Patience became my being

There it was all at once
Patience died one day

Alive again,
Someone long ago
Buried alive

This old soul
I must learn anew

Head held high
She walks hand in hand
With hope at her side

Arrogant they call her
Selfish they deem her

My Saviour, I adore her!

– Khushbo

Kindness

I always appreciate the smile of a stranger and the cheer it brings about in my heart. Sometimes affection and appreciation can be just as contagious as anger. I say donate your simple smiles, acknowledge random people with kindness. Aren’t we all connected in our woes and in our happiness in some manner or another.

When I Die

When I die

When my coffin
is being taken out
you must never think
I am missing this world

Don’t shed any tears
don’t lament or
feel sorry
I’m not falling
into a monster’s abyss

When you see
my corpse is being carried
don’t cry for my leaving
I’m not leaving
I’m arriving at eternal love

When you leave me
in the grave
don’t say goodbye
remember a grave is
only a curtain
for the paradise behind

You’ll only see me
descending into a grave
now watch me rise
how can there be an end
when the sun sets or
the moon goes down

It looks like the end
it seems like a sunset
but in reality it is a dawn
When the grave locks you up
that is when your soul is freed

Have you ever seen
a seed fallen to earth
not rise with a new life
Why should you doubt the rise
of a seed named human

Have you ever seen
a bucket lowered into a well
coming back empty
Why lament for a soul
when it can come back
like Joseph from the well

When for the last time
you close your mouth
your words and soul
will belong to the world of
no place, no time.

-Rumi

Defeat

Defeat, my Defeat, my solitude and my aloofness;
You are dearer to me than a thousand triumphs,
And sweeter to my heart than all world glory.

Defeat, my Defeat, my self-knowledge and my defiance,
Through you I know that I am yet young and swift of foot
And not to be trapped by withering laurels.
And in you I have found aloneness
And the joy of being shunned and scorned.

Defeat, my Defeat, my shining sword and shield,
In your eyes I have read
That to be enthroned is to be enslaved,
And to be understood is to be levelled down,
And to be grasped is but to reach one’s fullness
And like a ripe fruit to fall and be consumed.

Defeat, my Defeat, my bold companion,
You shall hear my songs and my cries and my silences,
And none but you shall speak to me of the beating of wings,
And urging of seas,
And of mountains that burn in the night,
And you alone shall climb my steep and rocky soul.

Defeat, my Defeat, my deathless courage,
You and I shall laugh together with the storm,
And together we shall dig graves for all that die in us,
And we shall stand in the sun with a will,
And we shall be dangerous.

– Khalil Gibran