The mind needs but a trigger to reflect...

It takes a certain type of trigger for a person to truly appreciate the real wonders of the world. With due respect to the things that I mention further down in this sentence: to me, magic is not the rabbit that pops out of the performer's hat, nor is wonderment induced by architectural marvels;  it's the miracle of the human body's healing process that is truly wonderful. And healing is not just about the tissues that spring back together, or the parted skin that inch together again, or even the nerves that snap back, restoring feeling... it's the healing that happens in the mind that's just as marvellous. 

Recovering from the injury to my foot has opened up a whole new dimension in my thoughts. And I'm now more aware of the orchestra of muscle, bone, tissue and skin that make the music of movement possible. When I started learning to walk as a child, I was too little to understand all the wonderful complexity... now I now exactly what I have been taking for granted.

 Just as in every effort involving more than one party, faith in each other is the starting point. My first lesson in re-walking: Walking is an act of mutual trust between feet. 

I couldn't begin to move until my uninjured foot recovered its faith in the injured foot's ability to contribute to the movement. That achieved, I started taking it a few steps at a time, and realized this: You never know how fast you've really been going until it is time to pause and reflect.

And reflect I did, so that I could fully appreciate that the art of walking, for many years buried in the subconscious, was brought sharply to the conscious. And as I pondered more over the act of walking, so complex in its simplicity, I realized that there is joy in discovering how you do what you used to do unconsciously.

The more confident I grew in my knowledge of this wonderful mechanism, the more I took pride in every step: every little bit of effort is important!

While my mind was outdoing my walking pace in its pace of thinking, healing enveloped me in its secure embrace... The old makes way for the new, it's all a part healing and growing!

Surely enough, the injured one gained the confidence of the other... paraphrasing our Man on the Moon - Footstrong: A small step forward for the left is a big leap of trust on its part. 

Some other discoveries: it's not the foot that runs forward that is really supporting you... your support comes from the backfoot, paradoxical as it may seem. 

And it's just gravity that makes going down easier: your muscles are more at home walking up the stairs... I find climbing stairs easier than walking straight. 

My paces may have slowed for a while, but my agility in learning to learn has just gained pace... 

The skill of weaving...words

Just like every other person in the world, I have my idiosyncracies that are so uniquely me... that are at times endearing (to a select few), at times just about tolerable and to quite an extent, vexing to other people. 

To me, doing "my own thing" is important. I need to have opinions that are so different from other people's as to provoke them to thought, to use words that others have scant heard of, to have hobbies that I  share with very few people... and so on. In short, appearing intriguing and throwing new light is "my thing".

So, when I write poetry, I want it to be refreshingly different, to have a style that piques the reader and gives her/him a sense of literary gratification. And, of course, I want to belong to a select few who are able to do just that. 

Imagine my consternation, when I find every other person professing poetic skills and composing couplets and quatrains, and claiming they wrote whole "20-line verses". I, of course, turned grumpy and withdrew from poetry as a certain animal withdraws into its shell, offended that my special skills were being "commoditized" and were being wielded with a fake sense of expertise by mere novices. I took a year-long break from poetry and also, got thinking. 

Do I really have a "style" of writing that I imagine I have? Or was I merely  averagely gifted at stringing  words together, and just possessed an exalted sense of my abilities? 

It also got me thinking on what makes poetry, well, poetry. Poetry is  an expression of oneself. Just as an idle doodle can be as much art as a Renaissance masterpiece, so can poetry range from the Vikram Seth-style rhyming verses to Keatsian poetry that draws you gently into its eddies until you yourself become a part of the whirlwind of words. 

I know all about the fact that everyone has got the right to use words anyhow as a form of poetic expression. However, I cringe at such grotesque extensions of poetic licence that result in "poetry" that sounds totally contrived. 

Poetry is not complete without the play of words that bring out vivid imagery, the alliterations that make you take a new look at the words that you once thought were mundane, the metaphors that sound so perfect that you wondered why those words were never used that way all the time! 

Poetry is all about evoking emotions... the magic wand that draws the reader out, makes him flow with the lines, live the experiences, be in harmony with the words. 

But of course, if the purists had their way and were to set the rules of the game, we'd lose some beautiful lines that don't truly conform, but are works of art, nevertheless. Poetry  has eluded definition always. And it will forever remain to be so... 

Poetry is as much about the reader's discovering his love of the language as the ability of the poet to fashion words together into a beautiful rendering. Let the words flow..  take your threads of words, and weave them into patterns of verse, embellish them with the sequins of imagery, be lavish with the tassels of your rhythm... but, most important be true to yourself... be true to the language...  be true to the one who will read it...