The Secret Carnival Within

 I am walking down a path today

And suddenly somebody taps me and asks
How are you today?
I,like say I am as joyous as the waves of the ocean.
Because I have the grace of nature's hand on my head.
Mystics bring you to this place of such an expansive sense of self
Where you are filled with love
It's no more even about gender
It's It's the energy that's just flowing
It doesn't even need a direction.
In my tattered pocket
I hide overflowing waves of joy
I may be alone
And yet at all moments of the day
I feel like I am in a carnival
On a treasure chest so small
That you can't even fit a look on it
My treasure is perfectly in tact.
And then he says water..
Will come to these eyes and it will go
But the moisture or the mistress
In my heart my soul never diminishes.
Let the shores keep account of less and more
Good fortune and bad fortune I got so much
Let the shores keep account of such petty accounts.
The sun may rise and the sun may set
But the sky above me is just where it is.

I don't know from where I got this. 

Found it in my old diary.

Some pages in an old diary do not feel as though they were written by us at all. We find them after years and wonder: When did I feel this? From where did these words come? They seem to have arrived from some inward chamber that opens only once in a while, and then quietly closes again. This little piece has that feeling. It is not polished poetry, nor is it an argument or an essay. It is simply a moment of inner weather—caught and preserved before it could vanish. Probably one that impressed me. 

The lines begin so simply. One is walking down a path, and someone casually asks, “How are you today?” Most of us would answer in the ordinary way and move on. But here the answer comes from another plane altogether: I am as joyous as the waves of the ocean. What a reply! Not “I am fine,” not “I am managing,” but joyous like the sea itself—moving, alive, restless, overflowing. Such joy is not the result of one good day or one happy event. It sounds like the joy of someone who has touched, however briefly, an inner spring.

And then comes the reason: Because I have the grace of nature’s hand on my head. That image stayed with me. It is so gentle and so full. We often speak of grace as though it must descend in some dramatic spiritual moment. But here grace is like a hand resting on the head—a quiet blessing, almost maternal, almost unnoticed, and yet enough to change the colour of the whole day. One feels sheltered by something larger than oneself. Nature is no longer outside us; it has become companion, witness, and benediction.

The poem then enters the country of the mystics. Mystics bring you to this place of such an expansive sense of self / where you are filled with love. That is exactly what great souls do. They do not merely instruct the mind; they widen the heart. They loosen the narrow little fence around “me” and “mine,” and for a few blessed moments one feels larger than one’s own biography. Love then is no longer confined to one role, one identity, one relationship. It simply flows. The poem says beautifully that it is no longer even about gender; it is only energy, moving and shining, not needing a direction. That line has the ring of real experience. In moments of spiritual fullness, one does not feel like a separate, defended self at all. One feels more like a current.

One of the loveliest images in the whole piece is this: In my tattered pocket I hide overflowing waves of joy. The outer pocket is tattered, perhaps worn by time and life, perhaps carrying the marks of all that has been endured. But inside it is not poverty. Inside it is abundance. How true this is of so many lives. We meet people whose outer circumstances are modest, even frayed, and yet they carry within them a richness that cannot be counted. The world sees the tattered pocket; only the soul knows what treasure is hidden there.

The poem says, I may be alone / and yet at all moments of the day / I feel like I am in a carnival. That line touched me deeply. It captures something that spiritual people often know but rarely describe. Solitude is not always emptiness. Sometimes it is fullness. Sometimes one sits alone in a room, or walks alone in the evening, and yet there is such inward movement, such quiet celebration, such secret companionship, that loneliness has no place to enter. It is as if the heart itself has become a fairground of lights and music. Nothing visible has changed, and yet everything is festive within.

Then comes the image of the tiny treasure chest—so small that one cannot even properly look at it, and yet the treasure remains perfectly intact. That little chest is perhaps the heart itself. The deepest treasures of life do not occupy much visible space. They do not announce themselves. They cannot be displayed on a shelf or measured in public view. They are held in silence, guarded in the inward being, and because they are hidden there, they remain untouched by the world’s rough handling.

The lines about tears are among the most tender in the poem. Water will come to the eyes and water will go. Sorrow is not denied here. This is not the joy of someone untouched by life. Tears have their place. They arrive, they overflow, they pass. But the poem makes a subtle distinction: the moisture in the heart and soul never diminishes. What a beautiful thought. The eyes may dry, but the inward tenderness does not. The soul retains its softness, its capacity for feeling, its hidden reservoir. This is not sentimentality; it is spiritual resilience. It is the assurance that grief may visit, but it need not impoverish the inner being.

And then comes a line that feels almost like a smile directed at the world: Let the shores keep account of less and more, good fortune and bad fortune. How marvellous. The shore is where measurements happen. The shore counts what has come in and what has gone out. It records loss and gain. But the ocean does not count its waves. It simply moves in its own vastness. So too with the spirit. When one is truly touched by inner abundance, the endless arithmetic of worldly life begins to look strangely small. Why keep tally of every slight, every success, every deprivation, every stroke of luck? Let the shore do its accounting. The sea has no time for such things.

The closing image is one of the finest in the piece: The sun may rise and the sun may set / but the sky above me is just where it is. Everything changes—day and night, gain and loss, tears and laughter, companionship and solitude. But something remains. The sky does not chase the sun, nor does it collapse when evening falls. It simply is. Perhaps that is what this whole diary fragment is trying to say: there is a place within us, touched by grace, widened by love, instructed by mystics, where one becomes less like the changing weather and more like the sky that holds it.

When I read these lines, I do not feel that they are speaking of happiness in the ordinary sense. They are speaking of a hidden sufficiency, of an inward festival, of the soul’s refusal to become poor even when life itself may look threadbare. They speak of tears without despair, solitude without loneliness, and wealth without display. Above all, they speak of grace—the mysterious grace that can place an ocean inside a human heart and make even a solitary walker feel as though he carries a carnival within him.

Perhaps that is why such lines survive in an old diary. They preserve not just a thought, but a state of being. They remind us that there have been moments in life when we were visited by a joy larger than reason, when the world’s petty bookkeeping fell away, and when we knew, if only for a little while, that our real treasure was hidden somewhere no loss could reach.