A friend and I were visiting a small sacred place, slightly distant and quietly cut off from the hustle and bustle of our urban life. It was on the evening of my birthday. The sun was about to set when we started on the scooter, and it had slipped beyond the horizon by the time we reached our destination. The light was golden when we climbed the stairs to reach the shrine. By the time a silent prayer was whispered heart to heart, the brightness of the moon increased. The evening had turned into night at once, after a slow transition. When darkness faded in, we decided to head back.
Since there was not much artificial illumination, we had to be careful while climbing down the stairs. While we watchfully placed our steps in the dark, I was explaining about the poetic way in which I had discovered the shrine... It was already dark that evening. The main entrance - the stairs we took - was unknown to me. It was another path that I had taken, along with an old devotee. A small flickering lamp lit a narrow path between thick vegetation. I was re-living that moment while explaining to my friend how the starry sky was unveiled as the narrow path opened up to the shrine, and how the little lamp revealed the divine in an evocative manner when the doors of the shrine were opened.
While I was immersed in my narration, my friend stopped under the only and barely functioning street lamp on the way down the stairs.
My friend bent down, picked up a small flower that had fallen from the tree, and placed it on the cement railing by the stairs. I paused in my narration and waited till my friend was ready to walk by me again. Though I continued to recall my first encounter with the space, the poetic way of discovering the divine, I realized something more poetic and more divine had just taken place then and there - a flower that was dropped, let down, by the tree itself had been picked up by a human hand!
Something took me back to that place even the next day. This time I was alone. As I climbed the stairs, I saw the flower my friend had placed on the cement railing, after picking it up from the middle of the steps. It had dried up. Obviously. But, since my friend had placed it on the side, nobody had stepped over it. It is impossible to stop it from drying and dying. Inevitable. But it could be saved from being crushed. As these thoughts crossed my mind, I could see the dried-up flower smiling. Perhaps it had heard the thoughts in my mind. Or was it my mind which heard the thoughts of the flower? Maybe it was the latter, and perhaps the flower was just thanking the kind gesture of my friend, and asking me to convey its gratitude to her.
I picked up the flower and brought it with me. I got it laminated, because I wanted to preserve it, and that moment which taught me something very beautiful and something more than divine – something very human.
