Aruanda

Leave my sadness behind me

Let sweet paradise find me

Heaven waits over yonder

Take me to Aruanda

Take me to Aruanda..

- Take me to Aruanda, Astrid Gilberto


Aruanda is that place beyond the sky, your own personal heaven or spiritual retreat, where you can escape when the world seems too much to bear.

When my process of meditation started two years back, I stumbled upon mine. It was a soft, green cliff overlooking the sea below. I would lay there, looking at the clouds and blue sky, seagulls, listening to the waves, mostly gentle, sometimes wild, depending on my state of mind. Sometimes strangers joined me there, people I've never met, maybe ancestors or soul travellers and I would gently have to request them to leave because this was my place, only mine. I learnt how to shield myself in this place and keep unwanted energies out.

Does this place exist in reality? I don't know because I've never been there. But it doesn't even matter, because when I'm there it's as real as real gets. Sometimes, I walk down to the beach. I feel the water, I see the colours of the shells, I'm not just imagining, I'm there.

Lately, though, something has changed. Whenever, I want to go away, I find myself in a different place. My mind has decided, for some reason, unknown to me, to go to a place from my memory.

After walking down a long, dark path, covered with wet, damp trees on both sides and the fear of leopards and wolves, one comes to a clearing. It is a flat ground at the end of the woods, but it is surrounded by fog. When you reach the centre of this clearing, you become one with the fog. You can't even see your own hands if you raised them. So thick is this fog, but so beautiful that once you are there, your body doesn't exist. Nothing exists but the fog.

When I encountered this place in real life, twenty years ago, I was scared. The idea of not being able to see the world scared me. There was a snake around too, and I remember acting panicky, telling everyone to start going back before it got dark. But not now, not in my head.

I feel stillness when I go there. It has no sounds of water, no chirping of birds, no cold, no warmth, just endless unseen white. No beginnings, no endings. I reckon I'll go back to the cliff when I want to. But right now, my white abode seems like a good place to be, especially when nothing in the world makes any sense. Except yourself.