The seed dispenser

The Seed dispenser

The seed dispenser is a miracle. I found it on a quiet walk around an old, abandoned colonial road in Raniket.

It is probably a dried bud, dead ahead of time – like so many of our youngs. All light brown, as if dried onion peels, and close-folded around a spherical, pollen dispenser. Looks like many folded hands that died in prayer – or like great terracotta Chinese warriors, who died midway in act and sleep there amidst decaying winters of civilization, eyes grey with dust and decay, in one neat aligned, unfolding column.

A small sectoral leaf enclosure of this seed is torn off in the wind (comes unpacked?), and I could see through a pollen bob, right out of a Star Trek -Klingon ship. Pores with pollen ready to shoot when the time comes. The skin layers will peel at the right temperature and time, light rays will diffuse and waft in, and life will just shoot spurt on earth, carried through winds, through trees shaking and animals grazing and birds dropping twigs, and all other migratory mechanisms that Earth employs time and again for diffusion of life. Brownian motion amongst trees and stars and ponds and mountains, long before chopper wings and spears were just a figment of imagination amongst sleeping cavemen!

Thus is born a tree in the forest. A cluster one by one, all at once.

I do not have a name yet for this shell that I picked up in this troll. And it does not matter – what is a bit of botanical treatise to mull and feel proud upon, when this forest path lies in grandeur amidst us without even a whisper of self-importance?

This seed and us– we are connected by time, not umbilical cords. Interconnected by smells, and love of forest, and the assurance that we are born together – a gift up for grabs feel to it. That on consumption, we will decay into each other, as each other. That no matter what be our shapes, deeds, and names are, the names will still be one – because we feed the same circle of life – in its oblong paths, some up front, some hidden and appearing at the last minute. Feeding and fed. One - as clowns in this circus of wind, pine trees, meadow sun shines, and one – when peeling layer by layer at the passive twilight of death.

The name is for remembrance, not identity. Together we all are - without names in this prehistoric amalgamation of chemical elements, timing, biological warfare, evolution, nauseous gases, and spontaneity that connects us to the Web.

No one can rip us apart – for separation never enters this gate!