Yahweh’s Journey- 1

My name is Yahweh. No, I’m not the all powerful almighty one, unlike my namesake. I am a mere mortal, bound by the same sins of the flesh like everyone else, doomed to wander these lands until time puts an end to our suffering.

My father, a staunch atheist named me thus, in a moment of wit and sarcasm. Much as I admire and respect my father, thrusting an unwitting infant into the center of his eternal war with organized religion was not something I forgave him for a long time. Eventually, I made peace with it, and these days I wear the name quite proudly on my sleeve.

I am new in this city. In this country, in this continent. There are many new wonderful experiences I have had here, and I look forward to having many more. There are also some things which are surprisingly evocative of home. Take the humid hot summer afternoons for instance. Or the beautiful breezy evenings and nights that follow. Nostalgia hits you when you least expect it, and makes you fondly remember the life you have had.

I was taking a leisurely stroll through a park nearby, watching a young woman play with her dog. The playful canine was laying on her back, eagerly anticipating his friend to scratch his neck. I wondered briefly, on how much I was missing out in companionship, of not having a dog that I could call my own. I remembered the last time I had one closest to a pet- a street dog I tended for, fought for briefly and then was taken in by a kind old lady for a permanent home. It was an alluring experience, yet one tinged with much heartache. The joy of seeing this little playful thing in the morning, hearing it whine in the night out of loneliness which would make me dart and hold her close till she relaxed, and convincing her that bicycles were not a mortal danger to her so that she quieted down. Eventually when she left my life, it left an emptiness inside and an inexplicable sense of a lack of closure.

I suppose this is the hallmark of most relationships- there are beautiful days, and there are days that are quite difficult. And when it ends, you wonder where the years went by, and you yearn for it to return. To me, this is the great beauty and tragedy of us humans. Ofcourse, one of it- the other one is our nature of being perpetually bound in time. We have such pitifully short lives, between when we are born and the day we breathe our last. Yet the preciousness of our time here makes us breathe in each moment, smell the salt in the breeze, hear the wind rustle the leaves and try to live a life that we can remember as we fade away.