Memories of Beautiful Things
A time to recollect, sitting here on a warm sunny day almost at the top of a high hill overlooking a valley where a road funnels traffic toward and from the lake that is two hills distant.
A time of review, of over four decades remembered: wonderful sights and sounds, speaking to me now in words of wisdom about the beautiful richness, the beautiful diversity of this planet which is our home. And I remember all these beautiful things despite the sadness brought by having so many times experienced the other, ugly, dishonourable side of life. For it is the memory of these many, many beautiful moments that I treasure, reminding me as they do of our humanity, often shared, often expressed, and often bringing hope amid the tragedy, the dishonour and the suffering that blights our human history and often our own lives.
A few, a very few of the so many, so briefly and poorly recalled.....
I remember sitting near a river one hot, balmy evening as the sun set, in India listening to the sounds of tabla and bansuri while people went about their lives: children playing, women cooking, men talking, a young bare-chested boy cycling standing up on black bicycle that was far too big for him. Even now, I can if I close my eyes see the beautiful colours cast by a descending sun and the dusty atmosphere, as I imagine I can still smell that poignant, evokative, smell of mingled scent of flowers, spicy cooking, parched soil, cow dung and dry air.
I remember, decades earlier, sitting by a camp-fire near an African lake as night came with its manifold sounds, and men, barefoot, and some holding spears, sang and danced, my world then each day as it came and went as I travelled with my father toward some distant hills.
I remember swimming out from a small beach in Malaysia where two small fishing boats were cast upon the sand, into what seemed then the vastness of the South China Sea while a hot sun burnt down, just to see how far I could swim, and at what seemed a long way out treading water to look back before lying on my back for a while, serenely happy. I remember the village nearby, and the friendly people.
I remember cycling along a dusty track toward Farafra Oases nearing exhaustion, with my desert-sun-bleached Australian bush hat held onto to my head against the sandy breeze by a makeshift chinstrap, when a four-wheel-drive truck stopped, its Arab driver, sole-occupant, greeting me warmly in broken English, and offering me water, water-melons, large tomatoes and a lift which I, stubborn to my goal, politely refused.
I remember the woman whose home was a hut in the African bush who nursed me back to health as I lay fevered, and the village elder, tall, thin, gaunt, whose wife was so many times larger surrounded as she always seemed to be by a gaggle of her own children. I remember the persistent flies, and the sparse food, shared. And the happiness as health once again became my friend, and the joy of just watching as a new hot day began ending the bushful sounds of night, and the sad death of a baby, newly born, bringing the people together in a shared mostly silent mourning when eyes spoke more than words.
I remember the cool shade near a courtyard near a Madrassh in the Punjab,
drinking very sweet tea made with hot milk served by a smiling boy, while a
bearded, turbaned elderly man with such gentle eyes spoke in reverential
words of happenings in the desert sands of Arabia, many centuries ago.
I remember the beauty of an English woman's face, and her scent, her eyes, as she stood by the door I had knocked upon one bitter snowy winter's evening when I, a tramp, was in need of water. I remember the sounds of her family, inside, and how the warmth of that house seeped out to me, and how I went to sleep that night, cramped up, hungry and huddled in all my clothes, visualizing her face, her smile which brought me an inner warmth amid the bleak, dark coldness.
I remember the flower-perfumed awe-inducing silent Temple stillness of the humid afternoon air on the edge of a city in Asia broken by the chanting of Buddhist monks. I remember the perfected garden in the Far East whose trees, flowers, running water, shade and sun seemed then as now to express the quiet, almost serene, essence of that Way I was then learning from the master of that garden.
I remember the beautiful young Sari-clad Indian woman with green eyes I
saw one morning while I stood on a corner of a busy noise-full street of a
busier Indian city deciding which way I should go: her brief smile a tumult
in my head until I rushed across the road, oblivious to traffic, to try
without success to find her...
There is much that is beautiful
But nothing that surpasses the beauty some women
Reveal
Through their eyes
D.W. Myatt