Dr. Mushtaque B Barq
As you walk through the woods under the relentless game of the sun’s hide-and-seek, an overwhelming calmness becomes your companion. Leaves cling to branches like birds grasping for life, while sporadic withered leaves drift downward. Each step you take disturbs the stillness, like an accidental stroke that detunes the strings of calm. The frill of foliage, damp beneath the solid rocks, lays a subtle trap. You walk over the unmanaged carpet of fallen tongues, the dampness spoiling your shoes. An abrupt sadness rests on your brow, hard to shake off. It overthrows, intimidating you, threatening to consume you. This may evoke a heart-pounding sense of loneliness. It often becomes unimaginable, like climbing a greasy pole. It’s a fear we carry within and confronting it turns into a journey of its own, much like a walk through the woods. Ignoring the proceedings can only leave you with regret.
And you regret, like a freshly fallen leaf resting on your shoulder—a crimson leaf. Light. Unwanted. It rests on your cool shoulder, a minuscule dilemma. Picking that leaf from your shoulder and ignoring the dampness that has already spoiled your socks is what walking through the woods teaches you: a lesson beyond classroom experience. No books. No bards. No scales and bands. It can be a canopy of unruly branches along the way that will certainly expose your serenity to the beams overhead. It is a patch you might either walk through quickly or pause for a moment. A pause with a purpose, just to adjust the settings of your camera. After all, walking through the woods without a lens would be like boarding a plane without a boarding pass. One cannot afford to close their eyes in a willing attempt to capture a thrill—a fantasy disguised as reality, a dream in the arc of tangibility. A mid-air shot from an airplane window can be as enchanting as a shot taken in the depths of a forest, where a leaf lulls a dewdrop, an insect on a dry leaf struggling among the naughty gushes of a stream, or you, as a lonely traveller.
A single click at times can be worth millions when you capture a scene hitherto untraced. It might be a bird whose songs are foreign to your ears, a motif of trees that never crossed your mind, or a landscape that pulses with your own heartbeat—a podium where you find harmony between exquisiteness and observation. A scholar may find it difficult to decipher the silent call that draws a person holding their camera, seeking to capture the profound and overlooked treasure that rewards the eye of an observer. An observer under the sun is anyway better than a scholar beneath the bulb. A bulb and the sun have no match.
Eyes are lenses with a difference: they see and preserve images on the shelves of the mind. A camera lens captures for immediate results. The image stored on the shelves of the mind may fade or be lost in the vast junk over time, but the one captured by a camera is displayed on walls or in digital albums, leaving a treasure for future generations. An image buried under the debris of mundane life dies with the person, leaving no trace behind to follow. That is why clicks matter. A much-watched piece of art on the wall leaves the observer saying, “Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.”
Walking through a forest with damp shoes and a camera, you are left with limited options: sit by the edge of a brook to clean your boots and squeeze your socks, letting the dampness dry under the sun, or lie back and let your eyes capture as much of the sky as possible, as if to show the sky that an eye can trap it entirely. The lens of the eye cannot be challenged, much like the mystic silence of the forest. The pupil, though a micro-entry to the macro cosmos, holds the entire horizon, leaving hardly anything unrecognized. Yet, as it diffuses through the boundaries of the ribcage, the same pupil fails to capture even a fragment of time that embodies emotions, a vital component of living. As the lens imprisons the external world, contemplation allows us to hold spots of our inner selves, preserving images in the racks of our mind. A lens of the eye and the lens of the camera are alike yet different—one in a living eye, the other in an artificial one. And between the eyes, a third eye from above watches over all. Only the third Eye can truly understand the eyes.
An occasional animal cry, the whizzing flight of a bird, a mysterious cloud overhead, a mossy patch evoking the velvety days of childhood, and above all, your own escape from the mesh of materialism would certainly be a treat witnessed by none but you. A feeling you would share only with a dear one back home or dwelling in the depths of your consciousness. Those who share such sentiments are rare, like an appealing hollow tree trunk that catches your attention but also evokes a sense of threat. You pause, and sometimes pausing allows for better introspection.
Introspection amidst the dense forest cover opens a path to peer into your own inner forest, where you have planted myriad trees of aims, objectives, goals, and dreams, all aligned with your long-drawn-out wish list. A narrow pathway between the trees, a broken brook, a tree with a broken neck, and untrodden pavement are just fragments of the lessons scattered on the forest floor, waiting to be completed. Walking through the woods without encountering its mysteries, eerie and creepy moments, and haphazard experiences means one cannot truly be called a traveller.
A traveller who ventures into the natural bazaars of the forest must carry something in their pocket—not as booty, but as hard-earned experience. And in the fervour of love, when you spend days together in search of truth, it suddenly appears like a fallen fruit landing on your head, prompting you to ponder it as a blessing in disguise.
From the top of a hill, after strolling across bumpy meadows, a breath-taking view of the gorge below fills you with a sense of confidence and satisfaction. It lifts the veils of ignorance and soothes your needs, which have long struggled beneath the cloak of chaos. The eldritch whiff of nearby pine trees surrounds you, and a winding path leads deep into the heart of the forest, continually inviting you to discover your own need to find the source. Amidst it all, a curiosity stirs—a desire to return from the herbs back to your homeland. After all, a man can no longer be a companion of silence and serene solitude; he is bound to live in clusters, for his needs are different from those of a sage who dedicates himself to the woods and prefers hermitage over home. The meandering path leads back to mundane world, but the whispers of the forest remain pulsating in our hearts that teaches us how to carry forward our fragments to make a unified whole.
Dr.Mushtaq B.Barq is a Columnist, Poet and Fiction Writer. He is the author of “Feeble prisoner, “ Wings of Love” and many translation works are credited to the author like “ Verses Of Wahab
