Rumi

One of my favorite verses from bible is Mathew 7:7


     Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek and ye shall find;
     Knock, and it shall be opened onto you


There have been many instances in my life when I found this to be true. When I ask and pray with all my heart, I do get answers. It comes in different ways and forms, but it comes for sure. Today was one such day. And I found my answer in the form of a beautiful Rumi poem. I wanted to share it with you guys. Who knows, it might be what you needed to hear all along..

Oh, if a tree could wander
     and move with foot and wings!
It would not suffer the axe blows
     and not the pain of saws!
For would the sun not wander
     away in every night
   How could at every morning
     the world be lighted up?
And if the ocean's water
     would not rise to the sky,
How would the plants be quickened
     by streams and gentle rain?
The drop that left its homeland,
     the sea, and then returned
    It found an oyster waiting
     and grew into a pearl.
Did Yusaf not leave his father,
     in grief and tears and despair?
Did he not, by such a journey,
     gain kingdom and fortune wide?
Did not the Prophet travel
     to far Medina, friend?
And there he found a new kingdom
     and ruled a hundred lands.
You lack a foot to travel?
     Then journey into yourself!
And like a mine of rubies
     receive the sunbeams' print!
Out of yourself ? such a journey
     will lead you to your self,
It leads to transformation
     of dust into pure gold!

 - Look! This is Love - Poems of Rumi,
Annemarie Schimme

A Journey into Spirituality

I have been on a journey. It didn't start yesterday or the week before. Neither last month nor the past year. This journey began even before I was born. Even before my soul chose this lifetime, long long before that I had started the journey. This journey that does not end with my lifetime; will continue long after my body decays. This journey of self realization and truth. 

Even if I don't know the starting point, I know for sure that my search for truth always intensified after big set backs. Love and loss, joblessness, depression everything lead me to probe deeper and deeper into the questions. Books were my first best friends. I searched for answers in Vedas, Bhagavad Gita, Bible, Koran and in the writings of Osho, Buddha and Socrates. The wordings were different but all the books pointed to one underlying principle - love. Love for all creatures living or dead, unconditional love for friends and enemies. Every scripture hides the same truth in its eloquent language and poetic verses. 

The second stage of practicing and imbibing the preachings were tougher. How can you love the person you hate to the bones? Can anyone do it? Yes, everyone can do it with lot of practice. The innate nature of human mind is kindness and love. We pollute it with hatred and bitterness. The more pollutants you add to your mind, the more difficult it becomes to unravel the hidden gems. Everyone in this world is different. The paths that work best for me might not work for you. That is where the importance of individual spiritual journey lies. You have to tread the path alone because you are the only person who knows what works best for you. I have been trying many different pathways trying to figure out what fits me. I never stop searching for new alleyways and side roads. Read, meditate, pray, practice kindness and find out what brings more joy and clarity to your thoughts. Even if you find a path, if you don't tread it often, it can become overgrown with shrubs and thorny plants. That is why you have to try and fit in spiritual study of some form into your life everyday. Doesn't matter what kind of study you do. All the paths ultimately lead to the same truth. And never rest thinking you have reached the end. If you think you have understood everything you might well be on square one. I try and learn everyday about myself, about the world around, the great plans of the creator and above all the power of love and kindness. This study never ends. Setbacks in life are my measuring sticks for progress. They remind me of the long journey ahead. 

So after a long hiatus, I'm writing to call on you, my readers, to venture into those uncharted waters. Start your individual journey if you haven't. If you are on the path, let me cheer you on. Never stop exploring this wonderful world of ours and the million questions it raises. Find your spiritual self and explore, for that is the ultimate purpose of this life on earth. Stay tuned to learn more about my own spiritual journey and experiences. 

Coping With Life

Last day while talking to a friend, amidst trivial talks, she made a comment, "I envy you. You just walk into a restaurant in a strange city and order a coffee and sit and enjoy it all alone. I have never done anything like that. I'm terrified of it. Even the thought of walking into a strange hotel by myself scares me."

When someone puts it that way, yes, its exciting. For most of you this might seem like a stupid thing to be jealous of. Everyone does that, don't they? Well I didn't until last year. Even I was terrified of going alone into a restaurant and sitting down without fretting about what people might be thinking of me or of doing something stupid. Being alone isn't easy. Not for many of us. Being alone and totally comfortable with it. Enjoying your own company. Not worrying about people thinking you are a loser with no friends. Or just of going alone into an unknown place. All that is out of bounds for people like me. Or it was.

Being alone in a strange city miles away from home with no one to call a good friend, company becomes a luxury. And you learn to go on. You learn to cope with the unknown. You learn to enjoy your own company or the company of the stranger sitting right across you and occasionally lifting his head up from the newspaper to smile at you. You learn to sit back and watch life as it rolls by. You learn that how much ever people pretend to care, they don't care as much about your life as you. If you want something, you have to do it by yourself. Life has this amazing quality. It makes you take the hit and then teaches you to stand up and fight back. You never know how far you can go until you push your limits further and further. I took the hit and I learned to stand up. And so can anyone. Its always tough, the first step. It took me 2 days of contemplation, a leap of faith and extreme hunger to go all alone to the restaurant just across my apartment. But after you make that first step, it gets easier and easier.

At some point in our life, we are bound to face situations which we never expected. Never think you cannot do it. Remember you never know what you are capable of until you push yourself. Having dealt with loneliness, hunger, depression and fear, I have learnt to appreciate those little things in life. Now when I have food in front of me, I thank God for it. When I have friends who stay on the line for hours at a stretch trying to cheer me, I thank God for the good company I have. When one of my student brings me his sketch book and shows everything that he has drawn, I thank God for the smile on my face. I have come out of everything learning some valuable lessons on appreciating all the small and big things that I have. No one said life is easy. But there is light at the end of the tunnel, ALWAYS. And its definitely worth struggling for. :)

Yearning For Home

The wind of this land can touch nothing but my bare skin

The rain that falls softly just cools my tired limbs

Birds here sing sweetly but their language I do not know

The land my feet touches, crunches in a strange whisper

The people smile broadly here and land stretches beyond sight

The food and the drinks whet my appetite but doesn't quench the fire

My eyes keep searching for that bright array of in-congruent colors

My ears can't stop listening for those blaring horns and tingling bells

I love this land that feeds me but its not home

I love the people, the food and the warm greetings but its not home

I love the birds, the dogs and the kittens but this is not home

I can leave my body and soul here but my heart is far away, in my home

Miles to Go

Miles have I traveled
Miles more lie ahead
Endlessly did I search
Destination never did I reach
All I wanted was to move on
Standing on the middle of the road
Now my heart yearns only for home

Having done my schooling and college life close to home, all I ever wanted was to get out of home and explore the world. And I got my wish. It was just like I had imagined - endless freedom. No one to question your odd timings or late night roaming (excluding the guard of our apartment), no one to scold you for eating maggie noodles three times a day, no one to stop you from shopping all day long, no one to censure you for staying up all night watching your favorite series. Yes, it was a time to break all rules.

But soon enough, I learned why there where rules. I learned why parents didn't want me to be out late. I learned some big lessons about health and why its important to take care of yourself. Learnt how tricky it was to manage money, how easy it is to loose track of your spending. Learnt why its important to sleep early to wake up and have a fresh start and productive day.  I learnt so much about people and even more about myself. I learnt that you might like being alone but that too has a limit. Staying alone in a house, I learnt pipes are messy things and that everything is fine until one decides to burst or get blocked. I learnt that food is important and that hunger can be painful. I learnt that money is important but more important is job satisfaction. I learnt that and a hell lot of other things.

Over the years, I have come a lot closer to being an independent woman. I have changed a few conceptions that I had, renewed a few others and completely destroyed my views on few others. I have seen a lot of people and learnt to respect people and their choices. I have understood its a mistake to judge people and the more people I meet, the more I am convinced that people are inherently good. Of all the things that I learnt, the most important lessons were about myself. Now I know, self discovery is the biggest of all discoveries. The person you see on the mirror is the puzzle that God has cleverly drafted for you. When Swami Vivekananda said that all the knowledge of the world is within you, he had a point. Never ever under estimate yourself and your abilities. Until you stretch your limits, you never know how far you can go. Until you dream big, you can never achieve it.

When I look back, I am happy with the way I have come and where I have reached. I am thankful for all the good and bad experiences that I have had. They have molded me and made me what I am today. Things that didn't kill me definitely made me stronger. Smooth roads don't make good drivers, the crooked and narrow ones do. The hardships I have faced helped me more than the good days to shape and redefine me and my core principles and values. If there is one point that I want you guys to take from this article, it will be this, " Be open to change. Life can get really tough at times but understand that its life's way of teaching you and making you a better person. some lessons have to be learned the hard way! "

Sanity & Insanity

My name is Aashitha. Yes, Aashitha with two As. I guess my parents wanted me to be first in everything and two As ensured that mine was the first name to be called out in every line, every test and every single place I go. Oh, how I hated my name as a child. Apart from those fun facts, I am quite a normal person. Maybe a little eccentric to some people. But that might be because I think a little different or maybe because I paint pictures that nobody understands. But I think I am a very sane person, more than them for sure.


I don't remember exactly when people started calling me crazy. The first time I remember, was when I told my friends that I don't know who Aashitha is. Tell me, do you really know who you are? People know me by my face. I know myself by what my parents chose to call me. But who knows the real me. I don't own all my thoughts, I don't know what my emotion will be the very next moment. I am not even fully honest to myself. I am scared of my innermost feeling, I hide them even from myself, my deepest thoughts and worries are buried in me. I truly don't know who I am. Do you know who you are? Have you understood yourself 100%? I know you don't. Then why do people call me crazy?

Another reason people find is my paintings. My earliest paintings were colorful scratches on the walls of my home. My Dad used to shout at me for spoiling the walls. But I couldn't stop it. I had to draw. No one gave me prizes in painting competitions. No one understood my paintings. The teachers in my school were all figurative painters. They never tried to understand the abstract in my paintings. Neither did my parents. They wanted me to study science and maths. But all I could do was scratch an image of a spiraling circle or a five pointed star with an elliptical center on the corners of my maths note book. I didn't want to know why earth was round or how many apples are left in the basket after eating two. I was interested in shapes, in colors, in the surreal world which was beckoning me. I couldn't stop painting. I had to draw. My pictures where like a particularly stubborn vomit that had to get out of my throat. I often felt my hands had a mind of their own. My parents never understood it. They shouted at me, beat me, locked me in room for days. Did everything they could to make me stop scribbling and scratching, as they call it. But I couldn't. Finally, I chopped my right hand off. I thought it will make my parent's happy. Now, I won't be able to draw. My hands can't control me. I thought my parents will be happy. I thought they will finally smile at me and say, 'Good girl!'. I was happy even through the pain as I thought of my parent's smiling place.

But I was wrong. They called me crazy and locked me in this cell. But its alright. Nobody calls me crazy here and I have learned to write perfectly with my left hand now. I can even draw perfect circles. I hope my parents are fine with me drawing because my hand has started taking control of me.. again.. Hope they are not angry at me. Hope they won't start calling me crazy..again..

Being A Girl

Been a while since I wrote a poem. This is one of those crazy poems that should be thrown away but manages to crawl into my blog. A little dark and a lot crazy, that's just the way this is going to be.

I sweep across the rough terrain
Like a wind in raging fury
Trees I uproot, rocks I grind
That is just me, being me..

I pour my heart on the thirsty earth
My soul lay bleeding for the desolete
Fury melts and sunshine spreads
That is just me, being me..

The darkest nadir my mind traverse
A robe of despair I wrap
Gloom I spread and trenches I dig
That is just me, being me..

I can woo the king and make a jester laugh
Wheels of fortune, I hold in hand
I fight with my look and win with words
That is just me, being me..

A whore and a goddess live in me
Unpredictable calmness and bouts of madness
I hold it all in the tip of my finger
That is just me, being me..

I sing like a robin's first spring melody
My grace has you staring spellbound
With the tilt of my head I can win hearts
That is just me, being me..

Scorching sun is a cool breeze
When you have me glaring in your dreams
Mercy is rare and no second chances
That is just me, being me..

Crazy, Mad, Wild and Sweet
I change myself in fraction of a second

Take or leave but never can you deny
The power I wield in my colored nail tips!