The Storm

 

The great red spot on Jupiter is a storm three times bigger than earth itself. And its been there for more than 400 years. But still most on earth are hardly aware of it. If you want you can just pickup a strong binocular and see it; yet most of us do not have the time or the willingness to even know about it.

 

May be some storms are meant to be big and last real long. Yet they are hidden; hidden by the dark vacuum. Its there, threatening and churning all in its path. Yet no one even gets the whiff of it. Read somewhere about the Frigate Birds! They supposedly are the great wide-winged birds, which live far away on islands in the Gulf. These birds only fly inland when a hurricane, or storm, is getting ready to rush out of the Gulf of Mexico and blow its wild breath upon the coast country. Do these birds always survive the storms?

 

Long time back, it used to be a unstoppable passion to fly a kite when the storm hits. The quickly soaring kite, the reel spinning madly in your hand, and to manage the kite’s flight when the wind takes a maddening turn. Feeling the sharp string slide across the first fold on your index finger, and then cutting in with a shearing pain as the kite dives down. We wished if only there were more than a handful of strings, then we might have managed them better. But one string – that’s all held the kite. Till that one string was there, and someone to manage it, it flew. Then at times, unable to bear the pain in the hand you cut it off to let if fly away into oblivion, or the strength of the wind wins and you reel in the torn and tattered remains of what was once a proud kite.

 

The summer solstice is always meant to bring a sea of change in life. Year after year it has delivered the surprises and changes. One more just passed by; the storm is still here; the strings going off one by one. Only the single string surviving; a single string that is not tied to any reel. The string starts to cut into the flesh. One slip under the shearing pain and the kite flies off. Or will it get cut. Will it survive the fury? Can time please run a bit faster?