Eng. Santosh Kumar Pokharel
World peace is a state of tranquility among the people at large in countries of the world. World peace is a state of no war, no killings and particularly a state where people at large have peace of mind. World peace is a precondition when people are healthy, they don’t suffer diseases. Pandemic is an unrest these years in the world leaving millions of dead, and behind it is essentially a waged viral war in clandestine. World peace is the absence of pandemic. World peace is peace of mind.
Wars, pandemic, and diseases are obstacles for world peace on Earth but there is a declared number one enemy that has been beating millions, humiliating billions and killing hundreds of thousands every year and that is hunger. So, addressing poverty and hunger is the first and foremost need of the globe. You know hunger comes with caravan of immune deficiencies and diseases that ultimately kills millions.
When a person is more than sated and the other is horribly hungry how can any harmony imagined between them? So, absence of empty stomach is a prerequisite to world peace.
Every war fought to date is a history of killings of the people and destructions of the natural resources. One way or the other round war has been a major cause of depletion of natural resources at large thus contributing to natural calamities. War destroys peace and right to life of world human race and at the same time destroys Nature. Wars exhaust oil mines, jungles with trees and plantations, pollute rivers, seas and oceans, and main thing they destroy civilizations. Wars are not inevitable in the name of their contributions to novel concepts in the world philosophy and literature but it has to be understood like promulgation of the new visions as byproducts of wars. In the history of wars of last 5000 years to date in our record, no war has been progressive in relation to the human compassion and love. Wars have killed human passions and made them harsher in life and so has the hunger done. A poet, a singer or an artist would better prefer a mild heart to a harsh one how modern and progressive the latter might be. Literature has been able to skillfully beautify the harsh utterances of harsh post-modernist poetry those won’t sound ear-healing though. Oriental epics in Sanskrit and those of the western Geek and Latin were lyrical and still sound sweet to ears. For peace music and lyric have always proved consoling to mankind.
I had once witnessed a mother singing her sad lullaby in a hospital at her child’s death. No one asked her to pay homage to her dead baby this way, it was an involuntary outburst of her love to her baby through her outcry in melody. Thanks to the respective music and songs poetry and folklores human race in different parts of the globe are contented. So, music, songs and poetry are the emotional tools for the human societies to experience bliss and peace and dignity.
And now on the pact with Nature!
Be able to admire the nature and her creations-greeneries, wild-lives and avian and people at large. Your love is returned to you in many folds by the nature.
Peace can be had only from love and love can be had from compassion, so cultivate a passion for compassion. Compassion is the fundament of love and peace in the world. For cultivating great compassion, you have to have a pristine look towards earthly and stellar objects. Sun, moon, and stars are in communion with a poet of high reach. Trees and vines too can feel your emotions and the animal world is no exception at all.
Look at them with a sense of love and care, and abstain from hurting them. Your proper communion with nature this way will boost in you a tender behavior and you will be away from conflict of interests. The absence of conflict is peace.
Nature is a very high phenomenon that reigns the universe. If a universe is a big emptiness or a big void, Nature is what lets this void fill with lives and get going and manifest. So, Nature is the mother to all that manifest in the Universe.
There has to be a pact with Nature or Nature won’t let you live and manifest in her realm and it’s quite rational. Would you let in your home a stranger that doesn’t observe your set rules? The Earth is not only for the humans but also for animals, avian, reptiles, insects, and worms, and the space is not only for human’s reign but also for entities that are still not given to human sights. Days are for us and nights may be for others. No human can claim Nature work but for him, and not for the others.
Unnecessary exploitation of Nature are compelling her to act her own way and the effects have already started taking place in climate and flood disasters.
Nature pervades the terrestrial and stellar worlds. So, you have to be in harmony with her in every moment of your existence here and after. Aesthetics as a branch of beauty in the human brain has not simply come underway for granted but has been born to cognize the Creator. And the Creator in the meantime is bound to follow the rules.
See the stellar planets follow their trajectories in a most disciplined manner to hold the universe in place, so Nature is an eternal discipline all the creations shall abide by or the life system could extinct. Nature is a set of rules that have been in place here from time immemorial to our knowledge.
Take emptiness as a source of origin of life here, and at the same time, refuge to your afterlife remains. Consciousness accumulated during life span here remains in the skies surrounding your planet in wave-layers and protected and made available for the thinkers and poets in need, and your creations depend on what wave you catch. Creating poems and songs and making innovations and discoveries are results of the mere connection of our heart and mind with those layers. These layers are well preserved by Nature in from when life here started. So, absence of a polluted sky is peace.
Nature is the infinite abode where all the existence given to our gross and subtle perception, and all those our perception is far from cognition of by our faculty of knowledge, have their place after their physical existence is over.
So, there shall be a pact or a negotiation or say in other words an agreement, with Nature to avail of her grace to peacefully live one’s life in full here.
So, a pact with Nature is a commitment to no war, it’s a coexistence agreement between human beings and Nature. This agreement is a tough pact to act in line with coexistence commitment that mankind shall fully observe. Mankind shall preserve forests and wildlife and avian, preserve aquatic lives, observe the cleanliness of rivers seas, and oceans. It’s likewise a boon in return on Nature’s part – good health and longevity of life. This virtual pact has been well observed by the sages, by the poets, by the singers and musicians, by the painters and sculptors and by the spiritualists and some others from ages.
January23, 2022 Bhaktapur Nepal
(Written for the International Poetry Festival of Medellin 2022).
(Santosh Kumar Pokharel is a multilingual world poet from Nepal)