Sounds of the soul

When something exceptionally significant happens in one's life, it is said on occasion that his or her planets or stars are in perfect alignment with each other. Similar I think is my relationship with writing.

A lot of my work comes from a pent-up surge that keeps building within me over time and once my thoughts have been incubated sufficiently in my mind, they decide they need to breathe the air outside it and that is when my fingers come into furious contact with the keyboard.

But a lot of other times, I experience these little epiphanic brainwaves which I realize I must record or else they just melt away into the ether just as soon as they come to life in my mind. 

I consider the planets of my writing aligned when I have the right thought come out and I have just the right music to accompany it. 

Music and language go hand in hand for me. Without one, the other does not seem to have an identity. Music is but a beautiful symphony of  just the right combinations of chords and notes that which when aligned in the right ways can produce nothing but magic.

This divine coupling of the right harmonius symphony with the pearls of language can only evoke what is beautiful. 

Writing in itself is a lovely experience. Through it, one can enliven death itself, it can also help one find oneself through the art of introspection. 

In my belief, writing can be of two kinds. The first is factual reporting - writing about plain facts and ensuring that sentences and facts are arranged responsibly and meaningfully just so that they can convey something physical. 

In contrast, there is writing that happens as a result of deep introspection and complex thought processes. Personally, the former process is a lot easier but from my perspective, it takes a lot of the joy out of writing because although one might apply oneself to the task, there is a noticeable void in such work which can only be filled with the introduction of a soul. The latter however is responsible for the creation of genres such as fiction and creative nonfiction. 

Until much recently, I was still quite cloudy on the concept of thinking. People usually associate thinking with the brain or the mind. But, only recently, I learned that the mind is in fact the soul and the soul is who a person really is. The body is 'what' someone is and the soul is 'who' someone is. 

I'm a spiritual person by nature and being spiritual does not necessarily mean being affiliated with any particular faith. I was born into a Hindu family, and therefore, my outlook is very Hindu, very humanitarian, very spiritual. Hinduism does not mean complex rituals or worshipping multiple deities of clay and stone. It just means having faith in what is good and that is what I equate with being spiritual. I'm also not trying to advocate my faith, because faith is a very personal thing and one's mind is the sole thing that no one can physically manipulate (leaving out the part about other forms of mental manipulation - propaganda creation etc., well those are topics for a rainy day and a nice beverage). I also equate spirituality with finding myself, in getting in touch with the good within me, with getting attuned to who I really am. 

Writing provides me that connection, it is my vehicle on this quest. It helps me introspect and introspection helps me write, so in essence, they are inter-related, two sides of the same coin (however, cliched that might sound). I could not imagine this universe without music or words.

In all that darkness of the space outside our planet, I can only unsuccessfully try to imagine what it must feel like to be surrounded by nothing but silence. 

Being a child of the '90s, I find it hard to understand the concept of silence, and it doesn't helpto be alive in an age where there is an over-abundance of sounds, or rather noise,  of all sorts - either croaking frogs, or gushing water, or someone rapping their knuckles on the table, or human voices; even in the dead of the night, the crickets on their nightly chatter, the whining cats, the occasional speeding car on the road, the sound of someone snoring or breathing. There are sounds everywhere.

Writing to me is a very spiritual process. It is my form of worship - to myself. I owe it to myself to write what I think, I spew out my thoughts for anyone who would be remotely interested in reading a few lines. Who knows, mayhaps sometime I might be able to hear from someone who relates to my rants. Perhaps in the process of my effort to transcribe what writing means to me, I might have done the same for someone else just as I know many individuals have done for me through their writing. 

As much as it is a lovely feeling to be appreciated for being unique, it is re-assuringly comforting on some level to know that there is at least one other person in this cosmos who can relate to what I think and vice versa. Hey, at least we aren't alone!