State of the state: Published

State of the state…..

A Treat for my followers…..

Up high from the skies, where people instinctively select their divinities and deities to be, people would appear like tiny ants down below. Certainly to the respective lofty mythical principalities and mystical personifications of supreme entities humans eternally suck up to, people are indeed like ants in their creative devices as in their appearance.

The plain landscape of the rugged hilly barren pasture grounds, always suffers from the almost complete absence of larger vegetation. The lack of large shrubs or any noteworthy presence of trees, exposes the grassy grounds to the direct lashing of heavy rainfalls. The scanty presence of numerous, almost colourless, sizeable boulders are like childish ilk smears on a plain green sheet of cloth. The rocks are placed in no particular order and litter the pleasant sight without actually spoiling it. Their sparing lacing of the scenery only appears to hurt the invincible soul of the otherwise quite picturesque setting, such that it seems to give the kindly natural aura of it a sort of scarred serenity, seemingly personifying religion without the slightest spirituality.

The onslaught beating of heavy downpours and the gathered down flow resulting from the almost daily torrents at certain elongated raining seasons, causes swift descending floods from the many steep hills that dominate the entire landscape. This easily erodes the loosen topsoil, devastating the seasonal defiance of the thickened greenery with the continuous outmaneuvering of its bases with sheer persistent pressure.

The spectacular radiance of the clear light blue skies above is quite an imposing background for the shining sunlight, to a raised vision. Especially when followed immediately by the anticlimax of that rock scarred pasture of patched green and contrasting reddish open soil with the descend of the vision.

At the bases and corners of the kindly steep hills, gullies are formed with gaping large reddish cuts in the grassy green grounds. They look like wide open wounds on the fleshy earthy body of the world. Almost like the immense load of responsibility for keeping it all together, is pulling the whole land apart at the bases of the many thick green hills.

This is apparently the situation with the very infrequent cooling and sunning, wetting and drying of the exposed parts of the richly loose soil. But still the greenery defies the scheme of the living moving presence all around it. It defies the encumbrance of the deep red earth beneath it, making its simple virtuous existence look obstinate though alive, like a smiling corpse.

The incessant seasonal battle of this activity rules the entire landscape and seems to breed a mood enthused by the irreproachable weather that it accommodates endlessly. Cleared of the misconception of its need to fight for its own existence as against just being eclipsed, the lush greenery still trove in this unsteady environment. This is an existence where pointless complex natural hostilities, predominate over easy nurturing tranquility without even a subtle reproach.

It is the shifting trend, farthest than any range of vision can capture from any vintage perch. The swing of the battle for the landscape switches with every season. Still the green dominates the hills permanently year round, with its strength formidable. The overwhelming green cover top of the hilly landscape keeps re-surging with the frequency of the rains. Every season the might of the greenery appears to keep rekindling with the freakish drizzles of the early rains.

But this hold ebbs and wanes with the crimson gnawing chunks of the lower grounds at the height of the heavier rains. The red establishes a firm hold all through the dry season, when all the green dries and take on a pale shade of faded brown. The trend has a mind of its own that vacillates, swinging back and forth, almost eternally undecided yet mutedly almost concerned for this.

In the vast spacious openness that abundantly avails itself to the grassy green hills and their muddy red bases, two colonies of Ants had made their nests. They built their structures with the reddish material most easily available and perched their cone ridged constructs, firmly on the same steep slope of a fairly large hill. Their deep cerise mud based residences contrasted the dominant green grass it was raised on and are sharper than the milder greyish boulders all around them.

The two Ant nests stood close on the grassy green, one slightly above the other on the hillside. They were almost halfway between the base and summit of the considerable descend of the hillside. Both colonies live completely independent of each other, as their nests stood well apart, like two miniature Eiffel towers over looking a long wide reddish ravine beneath their hill, at the base of the same slope.

The red valley beneath had widened every season, with the frequent erosive activities of descending floods down the hillside. The sheer capacity of water flow forcibly demonstrates the mean veracity of the impressive credentials of rain as the mightiest of foes, when it is at its untamed wildest. Water is at best to be wisely befriended and not futilely avoided at the foolish mercy of futile luxurious inclinations, as it is mostly the case when vogue entices modernity.

After a prolonged night of heavy rainfall in the height of the raining season, a number of things suddenly happened at the same precise time, without the slightest chance of it being remotely possible. The freak event wasn’t of the clearest natural formula and such an occurrence can only unfold the rarest uniqueness.

The Ants had started as two distinct colonies, both on the hillside. One nest was above the other on the inclining slope and the other further down the slope, closer to the large red crack in the ground beside and beneath the hill.

Just above the higher nest stood a fairly large smooth rock, a boulder of considerable size and weight. The rain fell all night long and had left the grassy slope very soggy, wet and slippery, when it stopped at dawn.

The rising sun gave the landscape its earliest striking of illumination at sun rise, while rebuking the dampness of the remaining peeping droplets with is warmth. The residue moist is pretentiously composed of defiant grounded rain moisture and the pathetic appearance of the morning dew. The settling fog was fading off with the slowly rising sun, as the morning was slowly getting drier.

The visual appearance of firmness on the ground is not in itself the true texture of firmness, it merely provides a platform to take any stand. This was the case beneath the boulder above the two Ant nests. The rocks’ foundations weren’t constructed by a million tiny limbs on deck, like the those of the nests.
Confidence remains with faith but understanding the dynamics of choice and poise is an imperative virtue that ought to keep even the dumbest rock firmly up its craggy heights. When the subject is lifeless and not attuned to life, when it wriggles, it can’t remotely squirm, show bewilderment or give a warning; a warning that cannot even be heeded to promptly.

The boulder’s alertness is not even slightly visual, its reluctance not conscious and its frictional restraint not the least its own. It is easily rattled by mere elements of no consequence as they avail themselves of the vast resource that would elude more formidable organisms. The vibrancy of such harnessing of its lifeless capability is so absolute that it thwarts reasonable sense.

In time, simple logic confuses itself and disintegrates into ageless nature again. The baffled lonely boulder gave away its perch with an initial slight slide, losing its footing like the vulnerable object it is. It quit its imposing station with pace, increasing it as it went down the moist greased grassy slope.
Without any other obstacle to aid it and intervene, the huge partly rolling rock hit the first Ant colony with the early rage of its initial brutal force. It uprooted the nest off its flat foundation and sent it rolling down at a slight right angle, towards the lower second Ant nest, still minding its own quiet business.

The erring rock continued it faster slide downwards, passing the nest it had hit while that first victim rolled down the slope on its own, at a much slower pace, like a felled small red log of rotten stump. The packed full tiny occupants within the nest felt the emptiness inside their hollow being like never before.

It was a very unique sensation within the living nest. The mud nest had been literally uprooted off its flat perch and set on a bumpy roll. But after traveling a shorter distance than the rock that precedes it had done before hitting it, the first nest had hit the second nest with much less force than it had been hit by the boulder. Still the full impact of the first nest hitting the second was considerable. The almost feeble velocity of the first nest was however just enough to likewise remove the second nest from its own perch. It caused an intolerable shudder within both nests, scattering both nests’ millions of tiny residents into a state of utter disorder inside their respective homes. The force had set both nests on a marginal free-fall course, on their way down hill.

The second crash had steered both mud nests slightly leftwards, shifting them back on the original axis of the rolling large ashen colourless rock, now much ahead of them, in their unconscious race to the hill’s base, in pursuit of the boulder. The nests descended straight down but unevenly, maintaining the trajectory of the rock. The nests were like two toddlers appearing to be running before they could crawl down a slope, in a hurried flurried stagger they couldn’t fathom or control in the slightest. The force of their now joint roll in the grass sent them over the edge, down into the ravine, causing a huge land slide in their wake, as they both went over, still intact.

The large ramming smooth boulder had gone over ahead of the nests, on its straighter route down the hill. The rock was faster and well ahead of the following red pair close behind it. The rock stepped off the edge of the wide ravine well ahead of its pursuing victims. Its long slide culminated with a final tumbled as it went over and fell into the red wide hole beneath the hill, with the speed of its much heavier weight.

The boulder landed with a loud wet thud in the near bottomed hole, to seemingly continue its lifeless existence of motionless eternally bedridden uncertainty, but the following nests were to get more than they bargained for. The force that sent the two Ant nests over the edge had caused both of them to smash on the preceding boulder on instant impact. The first nest crashed on top of the other below it, merging themselves into millions of broken earthenware pieces.

The swift roughen passage of the rock and the two nests in quick succession weakened the edge of the ravine and caused a sizable fall of the loose soil at their point of descend. The land slide that followed them collapsed the edge of the ravine they had come over and caved in on what remained of their nests, spattered on the rock. The landslide covered up the ruined nests at the bottom of the shallow hole. The nests broken remains were buried beneath mud.

Sometimes when the chips are down, it doesn’t matter what the original point of reference was. The initial point of view held, suddenly precludes what is paramount for what is instantly relevant. Such moments tend to curb all sense of integrity wrongly, by hammering on the point of immediate survival as against continuous existence.

The deviously intense circumstance of that very moment, farther admonishes the clarity of the blurry perception of the setting. It sort of enriched it with a clearer vision that recognizes the latest discovery of the utter frailty nature has vested on all its countless wards.

Terrified by the sudden bright openness of the world outside their nests, followed by the as swift return of damp tighter darkness, with the wrong kind of wet aroma, which they have a much less passionate recognition of, the Ants singularly renounced any references and restarted a long forgone struggle.

The Ants in both smashed and covered nests realized finding their way back home wasn’t tenable any longer. Their homes were literally lost on their own, when they got uprooted and tumbled down hill, to be broken into as many pieces as the Ants within it. They instinctively knew they had to restart their struggle to get new homes all over again. Relying on the signals of a language that has now been farther stripped of it pious muted antennae enabled phrases, isn’t an option either. So the only instrument to depend on is their effective digging mandibles, to unearth a path out of the massive cave in.

All the Ants singularly dug themselves out, each single Ant on its very own at first. It was quite slow at first, until they all managed to emerge from the moist damp constraint of the mud deposited over them. They appeared one after the other as they emerged in a good mix of black and gold for each different Ant, representing the occupants of each of the two broken up nests that came down the ravine.

As the Ants almost systematically pulled themselves out, to roam over the red muddy new covering of their shattered up nests, separately they realized they didn’t know the Ant nearest to them, in this new mix of black and gold colored Ants. Yet they knew that they had to confide and rely in each other to firstly search and rescue, then later erect a new nest for their colonies, right there at the spot of their collapsed twin towers.

They had little knowledge of each other, only what they recollect from fighting for scarce food in a shared habitat. The colonies didn’t know themselves well enough to draw hasty conclusions, so they had to choose the easier option of trusting.