TTW: Selected Thoughts on Love, Life and Divinity... by V.E.D

Over the year I have shared some Thought This Week (TTW) and here are some of the best one from this year ....
Hope you will enjoy them.

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WE CAN NOT BE ANYTHING ELSE...

Each one of us has a destiny to fulfill and we are stuck with it. We can’t be anything else. We are born with a map imprinted within our DNA, to achieve the greatness, fitting perfectly within the universal fiber of cosmic design. Hence our job, in this life, is not to become what we think as ideal, but to be, who we already are. But the problem is that we don’t look hard or deep enough within. We just keep floating in superficial desires and needs created by the chaos of our mind and day to day living.  

Remember, the easiest way to find that purpose of our life, is to look for what makes us blissful and at peace. Something that we are deeply passionate about and cannot live without achieving or being.

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DIVINITY OF OUR NATURE

“We can make our life ‘divine’ through each step that we take towards growing up – blissfully aligned with nature.

Remember, it’s quite possible to bring out the 'divinity of our souls', in living a beautiful life; with unconditional love and wholly accepting each step that we take in awareness, to where ever it takes us.”

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BE THE CHILD WITHIN YOU AND WALK…

“There is no past and future… it’s only the present which is ‘Now’. So don’t look back or worry about future as you don’t “Own” this life to those times, but your own yourself this ‘Now’, to be what you can be.

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LIFE IS IN THIS 'NOW'

"We always wonder, what’s lacking in us as we realize that we are not living life to its fullest potential. But there’s nothing lacking in us, it’s just that we get so bogged down by living in Past and future. The life is not in those cherished memories of past or in the insecurities of the future, but it’s in this “NOW”.

So to a live a beautiful life, live this moment passionately, without a thought about past or future, because the reality of life is right ‘now’ and here. Give it a best shot and you will succeed"

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BONDS OF LOVE  

"Bonds of love are without the knots of hope and desire. And if you need that kind of love, which ties one to another, then you don’t. Belongingness is not a shackle but freedom from it. It’s one’s own loving one needs, to realize oneself wholly into ‘being’ what one is.

So go ahead, Just love!!!" 

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BEAUTY, LOVE AND LUST

“Beauty of any kind is self sufficient, does not needs someone’s praise or acceptance. Just as love has its beauty of itself, does not need confirmations from the family, friends or any one you love. 

Remember, if beauty has expectations, then it’s going to dry out and fade in very short time, just like lust.”

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Shashi

ॐ नमः शिवाय

Om Namah Shivaya

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Thought This Week 1st Aug, 2014                               TTW: Sept, 16 - Existentialism

Spiritual Haiku Contest 2013 - Some thoughts from the Winners.

Some of the winners of Spiritual Haiku Contest 2013 have to say this..

Jana Žufić

Artist - Crotia

Greetings from the Adriatic Sea!

Personally, I can't wait to meet everyone, especially on such an interesting occasion. Hope I'll see and learn a lot during my stay in Rishikesh. I have always wanted to visit India, but the foothills of the Himalayas and the sacred river Ganges must be down right awe-inspiring... so I guess I'll just let my breath be taken.

Best regards,
Jana

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Dear Sashi,

Thank you for the great news

I am circling Florida by car this week, with erratic access to Internet. I am sending you a picture from mission San Luis, I will try to send all my bios profiles etc... but I have only an iPad with me, so it might take a while.

Best, Anna

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Dear Shashi,

I am overwhelmed. Thank you so much for this honor. Dear Shashi,

I am overwhelmed. Thank you so much for this honor.  I am out of town at present

but I will try to send you a picture and profile early next week.

Thanks again,

Julie Warther

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Shashi     

ॐ नमः शिवाय     

Om Namah Shivaya    

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Winner of Haiku Contest 2013

Renga - A Verse Every Day; Collaborative Poetry HaikuTea

A Verse Every Day - Collaborative short verses of three lines to be called HaikuTea

Within a Google group, I am moderating a Haiku Group Some of the friends there, suggested a great idea to start collaborative short verses within the members of group, hence this post to give a little back ground on the ‘Collaborative poetry’.

If anyone would like to participate in this collaborative poetry at Haiku Group at Google Plus, please leave a comment below with your Google Plus ID, so that I can invite you to the “HaikuTea”. Please read the rules, given at the end of the post, carefully to participate.

RENGA

Renga (collaborative poetry) is a genre of Japanese collaborative poetry. A renga consists of at least two ku or stanzas. The opening stanza of the renga, called the hokku, became the basis for the modern haiku form of poetry.

Traditional renga was a group activity in which each participant displayed his wit by spontaneously composing a verse in response to the verse that came before; the more interesting the relationship between the two verses the more impressive the poet’s ability. The links between verses could range from vulgar to artistic, but as renga was taken up by skilled poets and developed into a set form, the vulgarity of its early days came to be ignored.

Renga was one of the most important literary arts in pre-modern Japan. The earliest surviving renga is in the Man'yōshū, where Ōtomo no Yakamochi and a Buddhist nun made and exchanged poems with sound unit counts of 5-7-5 and 7-7. This two-verse style is called tan-renga ("short renga"). Other styles are called chō-renga ("long renga").

Two of the most famous masters of renga were the Buddhist priest Sōgi (1421–1502) and Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694).

The first stanza of the renga chain, is called hokku.

Hokku (lit. "starting verse") is the opening stanza of a Japanese orthodox collaborative linked poem, renga, or of its later derivative, renku (haikai no renga). From the time of Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694), the hokku began to appear as an independent poem, and was also incorporated in haibun (in combination with prose), and haiga (in combination with a painting). In the late 19th century, Masaoka Shiki(1867–1902), renamed the stand-alone hokku to haiku, and the latter term is now generally applied retrospectively to all hokku appearing independently of renku or renga, irrespective of when they were written. The term hokku continues to be used in its original sense, as the opening verse of a linked poem)

Hokku is the forebear of the modern haiku. The stand-alone hokku was renamed haiku in the Meiji period by the great Japanese poet and critic Masaoka Shiki. Shiki proposed haiku as an abbreviation of the phrase "haikai no ku" meaning a verse of haikai.

RENKU

Renku ("linked verses") is a Japanese form of popular collaborative linked verse poetry. It is a development of the older Japanese poetic tradition of ushin renga, or orthodox collaborative linked verse. At renku gatherings participating poets take turns providing alternating verses of 17 and 14 morae [(a mora is “something of which a long syllable consists of two and a short syllable consists of one.”-American linguist James D. McCawley in 1968) The term comes from the Latin word for “linger, delay”, which was also used to translate the Greek word chronos (time) in its metrical sense)]. Initially haikai no renga distinguished itself through vulgarity and coarseness of wit, before growing into a legitimate artistic tradition, and eventually giving birth to the haiku form of Japanese poetry. The term renku gained currency after 1904, when Kyoshi Takahama started to use it.

The oldest known collection of haikai linked verse appears in the first imperial anthology of renga, the Tsukubashū (1356-57).

During the last decades, the practice of renku has spread beyond Japan and established itself as a legitimate genre in English and in numerous languages around the world; the Global Renku Symposium, meeting in Tokyo in 2000, featured renku poets from USA, Romania, China, Russia, Australia, and Korea, as well as Japan. With the growth of the internet and of electronic communications, international renku collaborations have grown in popularity, including the previously mentioned countries as well as renku in French, Croatian, German, Italian, Afrikaans, and Esperanto. Sometimes, renku are composed simultaneously in two or more languages.

RENSHI

Renshi is a form of collaborative poetry pioneered by Makoto Ooka in the 1980s. It is a development of traditional Japanese renga and renku, but unlike these it does not adhere to traditional strictures on length, rhythm, and diction. Renshi are typically composed by a group of Japanese and foreign poets collaborating in the writing process in sessions lasting several days. In addition to Ooka, poets who have participated in renshi include James Lasdun, Charles Tomlinson, Hiromi Itō, Shuntarō Tanikawa, Jerome Rothenberg, Joseph Stanton, Wing Tek Lum, Karin Kiwus and Mikiro Sasaki.

Text Curtsy Wikipedia as linked on the topics
This is not an exhaustive report on the Collaborative Poetry, I have tried to give most of the links here to understand the form. Hope you have enjoyed this post.

To participate in this collaborative poetry at the Google Plus, please read the simple rules below…

RULES OF PARTICIPATION

1)    This is invite only effort, so you need to get invited. So leave a comment below to be invited.

2)    You will have to have a Google Plus account and have to be a member of the Group Haiku at Google Plus

3)    Once you are invited, you will be given a chronicle order, on the basis of your joining. You will have to write your linked verse, after a particular member which will be listed out on the HaikuTea page at the group.

4)    At your turn you will have to write within 24 hours your own linked verse.

5)    The linked verse have to have the first line as the last line of the previous linked verse and rest of the two lines you will have to create on your own.

6)    You will have to follow the short form of poetry, preferably in the 5-7-5 Syllable format.

7)    If, for any reason, you are not able to write your own verse within 24 hours, the next person in the order will be free to write his / her own verse, within 24 hours… and so on.

8)    Each HaikuTea linked verses will go on till every member of the group has finished writing one of his/her own or if the linked verse has gone beyond 100 linked verses or a particular time limit which will be decided by the moderator of the HaikuTea.

9)    …

10)  …

Look forward to your joining in the team…. Please click here to join HaikuTea....

Let me know if you have any questions.

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Shashi
ॐ नमः शिवाय

Om Namah Shivaya

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Understanding Haiku - A Beginner's Guide                           HaikuTea Session I

WHISPERS: Love, Destiny and Death

I have been very busy for these few months on my work front as well as I was not in the proper frame of mind due to some personal tragedy, in recent times, to actually sit down and write some of my thoughts and Haiku. But then the Indiblogger event happened which reminded me that there is always some time to do things that you are passionate about so got me to write these Haiku and verses. So you see a lot of pent-up emotions are here to explode and now all those thoughts and feelings are rushing back to surface... hope you could relate to it all.

Pain leaves traces of what

It was; Love, what it would be

In drifting apart

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Destiny is thread

That weaves the tapestry of

Life, in broken hearts

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Love is clear mirror

Of soul; unveiled beyond dust of

Memories and lust

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DEATH

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Every sound of silence

In its solitude

Reverberates through

A whole life - unlived

All that a flower

Springs forth, in flowering,

Is the beauty of the fall.

Remember, a day soon will dawn

When even the memories

Will not stay behind

To mourn

__________________
Shashi @ Oct 2012
ॐ नमः शिवाय

Om Namah Shivaya

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Cherry Blossoms

WHISPERS: Dante's Love Story and The Red Sand...

Remembering DanteAlighieri on his birthday today by sharing a very beautiful love poetry from La Vita Nuova ("The New Life") and a little bit about his amazing one sided love story.

(The exact date is not known, but assumed by some online records that I came across, to be 9th May, c1265–1321)

Though Dante is best known for the monumental epic poem La divina commedia (Divine Comedy), considered the greatest literary work composed in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature. But here I am sharing ‘Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare’ from La Vita Nuova the story of his love for Beatrice Portinari, who also served as the ultimate symbol of salvation in the Comedy.

Sometime in his twenties, Dante decided to try to write love poetry that was less centered on the self and more aimed at love as such: he intended to elevate courtly love poetry, many of its tropes and its language, into sacred love poetry. Beatrice for Dante was the embodiment of this kind of love--transparent to the Absolute, inspiring the integration of desire aroused by beauty with the longing of the soul for divine splendor.

Yet it is still not entirely clear what caused Dante to fall in love with Beatrice. Since he knew very little of the real Beatrice, and that he had no great insight to her character (Dante met Beatrice only two times first at 9 year of age and then after another 9 years on the street, as shown in the painting, below, while passing by, and she greeted him. She died 8 years later at the young age of 24), it is perhaps unusual that he did. But he did, and there are clues in his works as to why:

"She has ineffable courtesy, is my beatitude, the destroyer of all vices and the queen of virtue, salvation."

Dante saw Beatrice as a savior, one who removed all evil intentions from him. It is perhaps this idea of her being a force for good that he fell in love with, a force which he believed made him a better person. This is certainly viable, since he does not seem concerned with her appearance - at least not in his writings. He only once describes her complexion, and her "emerald" eyes.

The poems (Of La Vita Nuova) present a frame story, recounting Dante's love of Beatrice from his first sight of her (when he was nine and she eight) all the way to his mourning after her death, and his determination to write of her "that which has never been written of any woman."

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Text and Image Curtsy Wikipedia

click here to read more…

Anyways, let’s cut the discussion and share the beautiful part which, it’s said, is known to most Italian by heart...

Dante and Beatrice, by Henry Holiday.
 Dante looks longingly at Beatrice (in center)
passing by with friend Lady Vanna (red) along the Arno River

So Gentle And So Dignified Appears

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So gentle and so dignified appears

My lady when she greets others,

That every trembling tongue becomes dumb,

And their eyes do not dare look upon her.

She walks on, hearing herself praised,

Benignly clothed in humility;

And seems to be something arrived

From Heaven as a miracle on Earth.

She appears so pleasant to those who looks upon her,

And through her eyes a sweetness touches the heart,

Which cannot be understood by those who feel it not:

And it seems that from her lips emanates

A delicate spirit full of love,

That speaks to the soul: Sigh.

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Translation by Serena

Now coming to my this week’s poetry submission to dVerse poetry group…  after a long time… Hope you will like it too… Though I know after Dante, it will look so plain…

The Red Sands
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To incur so many misfortunes

I feel privileged

To still survive

With vigor that defies

The dark depths

To sing

An eternal tale of many lives

For, forever and more

Bound by strings of blood drops

Of many lives; shed in dying

I still see, within the sheen of red drops,

Reflections of your smile

Like a mirage

Calling out to me, forever,

To live on and on

Into many more lives of despair

I know these sands of time, too;

Will turn into

An another oasis of blood

A red pond sprouting daemons

In their finery of green

Palm trees, dates and cactus flower

On the desert winds

The sands of time

Every traveler strives to reach

This oasis of nowhere, in every life

Where path is the one that leads to its last

With every foot steps taken, bleeds memories

And every sigh, spills another red drop of living

Filling, forever, thirsty desires of

The red pond – just to survive

And a lonely boat plies

Within the fragment world of mirage

And the tired voice of my dreams

Lies down to sleep in the red sands of time

To the songs of eternal life

_____________________
ॐ नमः शिवाय

Om Namah Shivaya

To add your own verse at dVerse Poets Pub and read some amazing talented poets, click here…

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The Lost Soul

WHISPERS: In Remembrance & Moon Haiku...

Today 7th Feb is the day of remembering those who have been with you on your journey for some time or forever. Who precipitated the essence of your living, into the seed within, that will burst forth in flowering, as time passes by. Making the path of living, more vibrant and beautiful for the travellers in your wake... So here I am with some Haiku about a beautiful moonrise and the longer verse “Where Ever I Will Fall...” 

Moon Rise on ECR - Chennai 7th Feb

The beauty is

Not the moonrise, but the memories

Of my heart; Dying apart

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Moon shines

With all my memories

Packed, intact

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Moon reflects

The dying Sun

Ocean scent scars

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The Shore Temple - Mahabali Puram (7th Feb)

Where Ever I Will Fall…

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The withered temple waits

Forever eroding

In the deep silence

Echoing within

In the howls of dark nights

Sea, surf and sands

Search for that one sound

Of smile, lighter than the fall

That an autumn brings

Mingled with the red blood sea shells

I watch broken stars

Softly falling like dew drops

Tear the sands of time

White frothy waves, forever retreating

Taking whatever is

Still left beating in my heart

Where ever I will fall,

I will be the seed

Pilgrims of life

Create fire

And sacrifice

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Shashi @ 7^th Feb 2012

This is submitted to dVerse Poets Open Link Night WK 30, if you would like to read really some great talented poets as well as add your own, please click here....

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ॐ नमः शिवाय

Om Namah Shivaya

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Withered Dreams and Love songs