Looking
at the Lake
I am looking at Lake George,
New York, while walking its careless, distraught contour.
I see the immensity of its beauty,
carried over thousands of years.
A magnificent work of God bestowed
with long-lasting splendor,
To remind man of his banishment
from heavens.
A lake is God’s message of how
sublime he can be.
An envelope of water mirroring
human life.
It has life’s fullness, circumference,
inner turmoil, and external storms.
It has infinite expressibility;
it has points of personality but it is its wholeness which communicates
with us.
A lake does not tell us what
it is; to different observers it is their own projection of it.
It is a body of water with purpose,
but with a demeanor of purposelessness.
Lake George is a masterstroke
of imagination,
Reminding its visitors, from
generation to generation,
The power and benevolence of
nature over our lives.
A mirror we can hold to see
ourselves in it.
I stand before the lake and
Wonder at the nature of nature,
And man’s relevance in the cosmic
scheme.
I have roamed around the planet
earth for many decades
And am now near the last turns
of my end.
My life is only a little tale
in the infinite tapestry of universe,
Which I have tried to keep in
check from the human vanity and ego.
I look at the lake and feel an
eternity grab me,
My life seems to be an infinite
ribbon forever uncoiling.
Reflected in the lake I see the
colossal cosmos aglow in inhuman splendor,
Its apparent infinitude dazzles
the senses out of me,
Its mystery mesmerizes me to
a permanent wonder.
In the lake I see an arrest of
the cosmic splendor,
A micro-capsule of the energy
and enigma of universe.
Why is universe as it is, why
was it made in the first place.
The absurdity of these questions
is apparent, as universe does not have a human mind.
It exists by its design, it
is aglow by its own light.
It has always been there and
it will always be there.
For man to understand these things
is a liberation from earthly shackles,
A reunion with eternity, a stepping
into the cosmic dance.
Human life was not meant to be
lived as it is generally,
Man carries too much worthless
baggage with him –
The artless designs of his scheming
brain.
Man stands as a caricature of
his natural majesty,
A wasted spark in the worldly
morass.
A lake is controlled mass but
with infinite expressions,
It is a circumscribed possession
but forever echoing liberation,
Its circumference aches to expand,
its surface desires to dance off to evaporation,
Its feet are on ground but its
heart is dancing to the other drummer,
It appears static but it is
a dynamic state of shifting masses.
A lake is a cosmic dance with
a human face.
A lake is ripeness at ease with
itself,
Grace forever held by its weight.
It aspires the dance of waves
but is content to remain within its shores,
Freedom never squandered in
rash adventures of an ocean or a river.
If man could only be like a lake,
Finite but soaring in its spirit,
Bounded but bursting to expand,
Possessed but with flexible
circumference,
Static in composure but dynamic
in disposition,
Effervescent in its longings
but controlled in its demeanor.
A lake is brimming with hope
that tomorrow will be better,
Because its guts have churned
enough and its bosom has heaved enough,
Its patience has stretched long,
And has no theatrics to play.
A lake is a human condition,
Structured yet fluid,
Like life a lake is just a ripple
across time,
Where imagination gives it context
and meaning.
A lake is a slice of human heart
resting on god’s little fingers.
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