“ you must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”
-Nietzsche
Chaos, conflicted mind, unsettled heart, can keep you from being satiated, true enough. But at the same time, they can inspire you to create a possibility of dwelling into a being which pushes the threshold of human imagination.
When you want nothing to bound you,
Nothing to hound you,
Nothing to define you,
Nothing to refine you,
When you want to defy every expectation,
Kill every instance of serving to others fancies,
is really when you found the unruly,
and yet, so tranquil bottom of your soul.
It’s not my battle against the world,
But merely my strife for love.
Love is radical. Everything borne out of love- compassion, restlessness, revolution, everything is radical. Why ? Why is society so threatened by something that it itself overly celebrates. Maybe because love has no respect for the boundaries. What would happen then? Either love would remain under the surface, barely alive, hidden from the eyes of society. Or it'll bloom into wilderness, despised by everyone, impossible not to be noticed with all the havoc it invites. It's raw beauty flares from the folds of the tragedy such unleashed. I'm not to say love is evil. Rather, what is evil is to domesticate love. Then, whether it’s love for the beloved, or love for one’s homeland. You try to compress a force beyond you. You try to contain the free will of the people. Of course it'll turn into a battlefield. “And if our blood has to spill, let it spill all over the city.”
Such was my experience, when I came across Tenzin Tsundue. That’s when I realized what Darwish meant by “what makes life worth living, we already have it on earth.”
Tsundue is a refugee poet in exile from Tibet. We don’t know whether there will be an independent Tibet or not, but that doesn’t stop the poet from preserving Tibet in his poems, songs and relentless instances of one man revolution that does not kneel to any degree of suppression. He is not at war with his unfair reality. To me it seems, both have rather co-created each other. The exile created a refugee. Now the refugee recreates Tibet everyday, weaving it in his prose of living memory. This lived memory is so intriguing, it doesn’t suffer from the attachment to the pain of the past, nor is it disturbed by the urgency of clinging to the hope in future. The lived memory is a mandate he has for today. It is insulated by the pain of yesterday and uncertainty of tomorrow. He says his romance for freedom is over and above every realisation of the practically hopeless reality of Tibet’s freedom. He faces such odds every day, yet the sheer wealth of love and spiritual exuberance he carries in his heart will leave any common man baffled. I see him unapologetic for himself, and forgiving for others. Crossing paths with people like him is like experiencing yourself being transformed. You believe more, you fear less, you can hope against hopelessness, you are able to imagine possibilities. I guess that's what makes the earth worth living.