The light has gone out but the shadows remain forever...

Lemme tell you a story about a guy called Feather, a guy with lots of artistic integrity and creative exuberance. And a plebian who aspired to be a patrician among the connoisseurs of arts !

He was treading off the beaten path and I walked a few paces along with him. The path was rugged and snaked through thick impenetrable woods. He looked etiolated and phlegmatic, resigned to the triviality of ever consuming uncertainties. His gait lacked aplomb but was never aquiver. His forlorn eyes had denied sleep of it's natural habitat and were hypnotic manifestations of existential crisis. A wayward wind billowed his shirt and reminded him of his freedom, and the repurcussions of accepting or rejecting that freedom. A cognitive dissonance pervaded his whole being and he seemed to be in a perennial dilemma about how to confront it. The huge blanket of darkness enshrouded us and made us oblivious of the faint light of moon and stars. The yin, darkness was clearly more assertive than the yang, brightness. Figuratively it elucidated Feather also ! The yin, femininity, within him was always more powerful than the yang, masculinity inside him !

Feather carried a lighted candle in a coconut shell. The flame guttered in the marauding onslaught of winds but refused to blow out. The flame struggled to wrest space from the unrelenting darkness, quite similar to how our dreamz wrangled with the unbending realities. Feather spoke eloquently. He told me his surreal tale, about how he spent time with the yin within him. The moments when propinquity of thoughts made words redundant, the moments when covetousness sparked self actualization, the moments when emotions professed acquiescence and those moments of light with resplendent colors which left fragmented shadows of memories that would last forever. However, mysticism could not control the attitude of yin to the external world, the world outside Feather, in which she resided perennially though metaphorically she always nested inside Feather. She sought her self actualization by rejecting him. She honored her ethical obligation to a world outside Feather by circumventing her moral obligation to be with him always, which would in turn bring her appreciation from multitude. For Feather, who saw art in everything, that was nothing but Aesthetic Realism. And he loved her more for that renunciation !

I listened to him without interrupting and glanced at the candle flame. I knew very well that the shell would ultimately protect it from any gale and it can never be snuffed out no matter how strong the tempest is. He caught my furtive glance and whispered something. May be, the sanest choice is to insanely protect your eternal flames of hope with the shell of your instincts so that the insane winds of realities cannot blot it out. I took leave of him and watched him go. As he faded into the eagerly consuming darkness, his words echoed in my ears. The light has gone out but the shadows remain forever. And those shadows have lighted flames that shall never fade, the eternal flames...