Mongolia 16/7

*Dated 16/July/2000 (also some 12 years ago...)

I love the unbounded green fields in Mongolia in particular. Everything was so still, and yet everything was moving and flowing. I could feel the minute, or even delicate, vibration of life within the strong peacefulness. I could feel the rhythm within that silent music. The cattle and horses were beautiful. Their black and brown skin was shining under the sunlight as if it were velvet. The fragrance of grass and the smell of animals; everything came to the smell of stillness in the air. The mountains in a great distance were covered with the greyish-blue silken touch. You can really swim in the vast greenness, swim in the Golden Lotus blossoms and swim in the clean and light sky. So there was this serene beauty in every touch, in the sensuous world belonging both to celestials and human beings. The sunset here began with purely golden shines and then smeared over and dyed the sky and the earth with melancholic pink. Everything was melting together into a pure spark. The sky in Mongolia was not as blue as it sometimes is in London, so blue that it is piercing. The Mongolian sky was light, clean and limpid. Like music. Like a song.


"The poignant song is echoed through all the sky in many-coloured tears and smiles, alarms and hopes; waves rise up and sink again, dreams break, and form. In me is thy own defeat of self."

"It is this overspreading pain that deepens into loves and desires, into sufferings and joy in human homes; and this it is that ever melts and flows in songs through my poet's heart."

"He it is who puts his enchantment upon these eyes and joyfully plays on the chords of my heart in varied cadence of pleasure and pain.
He it is who weaves the web of this maya in evanescent hues of gold and silver, blue and green, and lets peep out through the folds of his feet, at whose touch I forget myself.
Days come and ages pass, and it is ever he who moves my heart in many a name, in many a guise, in many a rapture of joy and of sorrow."

"Keeping steps with that restless, rapid music, seasons come dancing and pass away---colours, tunes, and perfumes pour in endless cascades in the abounding joy that scatters and gives up and dies every moment."

~ from Gitanjali, by Rabindranath Tagore, extracts of verses 71, 84, 72 & 70