The other day I was peeling off the sheaths covering a cob
of corn. For no reason, it became a mystical experience – the mystery of its
design and beauty. I almost felt guilty boiling it, leave alone eating it. The
overlapping sheath, the arrangement of the pearls inside and the silky tuft
require more than genetics, physics and chemistry to be explained.
Today, I was peeling a cucumber admiring its beauty with
similar feeling. Later in the day, I was reading about the color of human skin
as an immutable reality.
All these are covers. They are covering something essential
inside. The cover (sheath, cover or hide or skin) is the limiting structure,
margin between one individual life structure and its surroundings. It sets
limit to the contained. It separates. It separates one from the many and from
the whole.
We must look deeply and look past the separation our “skin”
creates between what is inside us and inside the “cover” of others. As was
pointed out several centuries back, a pocket of air inside a pot is the same as
the air outside. Break the pot and see the wholeness of the interior landscape.
No comments:
Post a Comment