The Tree Of Life

It stood in front of him, with all its sprawling branches and enchanting beauty. The Tree Of Life! He wondered about all those mythologies, the folktales and the legends that were lost in the layers of time. But here, the world, in all its essence had come to a pause. It felt like time and space have ceased to exist. He took a step towards it, crunching the leaves below his feet. Then another and another and another!

The prophet’s words echoed in his ears as the tree now seemed within palm’s reach. The connotation had been sublimed to comprehensible depths and he had found his purpose in this creation; to search for the element that connects the underworld and the heavens, the tree that governs life. The voracious desire was to drink from the sap of the tree. The prospects of everlasting youth and eternal life reeled in front of his eyelids like a shadow dancing against a dead wall.

He tiptoed towards his Sun, the tree, like a devotee approaching his deity. He gaped at its enormity, the magnitude of the creation, as if the whole universe was caged within the tree. Perhaps, the tree itself, along with its withered branches and brown leaves, was the universe! Vast, immeasurable, interminable, ever escalating and ever expanding!

Reflecting at the complexity of its gargantuan height, he somehow, felt complete. Each of its branches intertwined with another, a stem losing itself in a leaf, a bud disappearing into a flower. The bark supported the weight of the tree, the weight of the cosmos; with its head reaching to paradise and the roots grounding towards an abyss.

Nirvana was attained in that very moment and was shattered in another as the insatiable lust for the liberation from sufferings, gripped him. Inside the depth of his cold soul, he knew that these divine conjurers; pain and death, are here to be eliminated from the mankind.

After scraping the façade of the tree, he bent down as the liquid gratified his lips, caressing the rims gently. The cosmos shifted, the stars died around him and were born again. He perceived the pattern between the interlinking of the lives of each and every individual, as marked by the branches of the tree. His feet got lifted in the air as he saw a spiral of Energy hovering in the interstellar. Life, death, hope, freedom, pain and happiness; the translucent colors of existence now had a deeper meaning. He saw the order. He saw Our Master. Gradually, his flesh amalgamated with the bark and became one. He was then, consumed by the Tree of Life.


(first published in www.udaipurtimes.com | http://www.udaipurtimes.com/the-tree-of-life/)