Random thoughts on a balmy afternoon!

As I sit re-reading Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary on this particularly balmy end-summer afternoon, I feel a sense of unmistakable peace stealing over me. I sit on my patio admiring the queer shaped cloud-monsters staring at me blatantly and observing the pattern of the sap-green hibiscus leaves. It’s beautifully quiet save for the occasional chirrup of birds, the guttural noise squirrels make, the flapping of pigeon wings and the intermittent thudding sound wafted from the carpenters’ workshop next door. Having spent the whole day reading and writing away from the hinterland of social media and cellular phone, I feel a lambent radiance slowly illuminating the hitherto dark corners of my mind riddled with the soot of future worries. Indeed, I am now convinced that when you need answers it’s best to look inside. I don’t know how many of you are in love with solitude and occasional asocial life, but I know I am. I derived the greatest pleasure today when I directed my attention toward my avocation. Writing solves problems, I am sure it does. I know sometimes it is hard to string together the thoughts; sometimes the mind is so eerily quiet that you begin to doubt. Nevertheless, you must persevere; at least that is what Virginia Woolf did. She labored from one story to another turning a conscious eye toward her art and striving her best to perfect it through experimentation and constant reading. I have always found Woolf a darling writer. I love her, and so, I love her fiction. Her often snobbish, often prudish nerd-like philosophical stance is deliciously palatable to my taste-buds. I remember getting back to this diary of hers when I was stuck with a short story a few years ago. The reading did nothing to alleviate the stifling situation, but it sure made me more confident of myself. Woolf is my panacea; and this afternoon I feel I love her more than ever. The cloud-monsters keep changing position in the sky sometimes growing grim with sudden desperation and sometime allowing the sun to permeate through them with the vim and vigor of a teenager. I see them and wonder if Woolf too had stared like me at some cumulous populated once-azure sky and indulged in wordplay. I can imagine her frail form at her desk close in her study looking out with an admiring eye at the ever-changing visage of a day. Somehow the colors seem very bright to me today. The digladiation between contradictory thoughts is conspicuous by its absence. All is calm, all is quiet. I know sometimes I let myself go on and generally give in to lugubriousness or loquaciousness without reticence, but the process of penning rambling thoughts clarifies several of my life’s puzzles for me. At the touch of self-created philosophy and under the aegis of contemplation, my thoughts sort themselves out. I think it’s going to rain this evening; I will wait for it.