THE MIST THAT COVERS ALL

“Do you want you see the lake grow larger?” asks my son.

“Hmm?”

“Keep watching! When the mist covers the mountains and tumbles down onto the water till you can’t see the other side of the lake, it becomes larger; it can even stretch to infinity!”

Now, I had been watching this lake for fifty years; it is about a thousand yards long and three hundred to four hundred yards wide, bending gently to curve into a bean shape. This is the first time that I have been able to stretch its shores as far as I like! The mist has always been fascinating. Scores of times I, or many others like me, have been rowing a boat when all is enveloped by the mist - now ethereal wisps of glaring bright, now brooding clouds laden with moisture. But the thought in our minds has always been that we know the lake too well to be fooled by the mist, and the shores are nearby, exactly where they should be.

I know! I can define…

...till a 19 year old lad shows how he's been stretching the shores of a lake till infinity.

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The mist rolls; a tumbling mass of endless whiteness, sometimes rising lightly, sometimes drooping and bending under the weight of the water it bears. It wets the walls and darkens the corridors of the old school buildings. It brings gentleness into the voices of the teachers - scolding men and shrieking women – and it dampens the screams and shouts of the children. It brings a sense of peace, this shroud of mist; it softens the edges, it rounds off corners, everyone walks a bit slower and talks a little softly, as if in a place where one must be quiet. I open a bedroom window to welcome the rolling cloud deeper into my life.

The smoke-like wisps that rise on a sunny day from the valleys and skim over the tops carry hope and cheer and promise, but the mist that engulfs deeply brings satisfaction and wholeness and peace and quiet. Maybe because it restricts the visual domain while still retaining the light, an inner glow; the fears of the unknown dark are absent, but the shroud that limits the impression of vision is very much present, benign and enjoyable; a gentle embrace.

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The tangible, the audible, the visible, the thinkable, the imaginable, are all being shrouded in a benign mist. It rolls and flows, and smoothens the sharpness. It dampens noises. It absorbs jolts. It gently swathes imaginings.

Is this mist called Naam, or Simran? And the shores of definition stretch to touch infinity?

My dear friend Ravi wanted me to write about the mist. I am grateful to god for him.