That is not the way a prophet looks at a miracle, for a prophet is a person who sees a miracle in everything that we take for granted. To a child, as to a prophet, even a bud opening into a flower is an event miraculously enchanting. As is the sight of a gigantic object carrying over 400 persons plus the other load, suddenly leaving the ground and flying into the vast skies with no support from anywhere. To an aeronautical engineer or a pilot, this is a boring routine; to a child, it is an experience worth going thousands of miles to see.
To a child, as to a prophet, the rainbow is a miracle with joy without end. So are the colours of life, and life itself. As is the very existence of the universe. Where did all this empty space come from in which galaxies swim freely in trillions and of sizes that cannot be measured except in terms of light years . A light year is the distance travelled by light in one year at a speed touching 300,000 KMs per second. And now imagine a child's and a prophet's thrill to know that even the smallest cluster of galaxies spreads several million light years across ! Or that the universe is expanding but expanding into nothing ! Or that while it is not allowed by the universe for anything to travel faster than the speed of light, a small human brain has waves that can scan, race to and back from billions of multiple universes in less than a second ! A prophet needs no explanation for a miracle because fr him everything, even the universe bothering to exist, is a miracle. A cool easterly breeze is a miracle which has nothing unnatural about it -- nor solar flares, black holes or baby universes. To a prophet, these are miracles because even though there is an explanation for each one of these phenomenon, there is no explanation why a different explanation is not possible. No explanation for any explanation not being different from what it is. Yes, the universe has laws, but why are these laws not different. Could a minor shift in the big bang singularity would have produced a different set of laws in which for instance humans could remember the future rather than the past. There is no need to look for explanation why a child is dearer to her mother than any other child. These are just simple miracles of everyday existence, a part of the cosmic poetry that sings through galaxies.
A Prophet is a person to whom the whole nature is a miracle and therefore all miracles are natural. A prophet is a poet who has come to believe in his poetry and dance to it. To him, the fact that something has an explanation does not disqualify it from being a miracle.
On the other end are people for whom even love is not a miracle because it can be explained as a neural activity.
A miracle is not a miracle because it defies explanation; a miracle, on the contrary, is a miracle because the beauty of its simplicity. Children, lovers, poets and prophets enjoy the miracle-packed life; the rest merely stop taking interest once they can explain something. That is a miracle.
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I am glad that my old firend, Manpreet Badal, happens to be Washington while I am already here in connection with an issue I had left long unattended. I would ahve loved to go around the town with him , visiting some of the greatest monuments of "unageing intellect" that dot this unofficial world capital. I stepped out for a long early morning walk and some light solo-soccer as my hosts and the rest of the city slept away to glory. There is a smal open park close to where my hosts live, quiet, peaceful and shy. The mighty Potomac, which loves to roar its soveriegnty all day, all night is, for some unknown and strange reason, just whispering gentle prayers of epace as it glides almost embarrassed by its own might and magnitude and behaving at this hour like a most beautiful bride, happy in yet embarrassed by her own beauty. And its rubs its belly on the bosom of the riverbed , lost in ecstasy and eyes closed both in sheer bliss and in self conscious diffidence over its irresisitible charm in this mood. The sky above, a clear blue and unmoved and umoving ascetic yet looks benign as it watches from a height not measureable by human mind. I could never have believed Washington would have moments of such divine peace as it has this hour. Wordsworth tip-toed back into my mind after years of separation:
"Earth hath not anything to show more fair:
Dull would be he of soul who could pass by
Asight so touching in its majesty;
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering inthe smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock or hill;
Never saw I, never never felt a calm so deep!
The river glideth at its won sweet will:
Dear God ! The very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still."
A few hours from, this moment of sublime quiet and oenness with the universe would be lost yet again in the din of 'towns and cities'. A few hours away also lies the moment where th agenda of hatred would be sought to be camouflaged by 'concern for Punjab and the need for a new revolution' ( Read change of face of those in control of civil scretratiat.)
What an irony that just at that hour, when someone from Punjab, who spends hours coining slogans that would announce him as the new messiah of political revolution, would be balring away about the number of jeeps that line up the carvan of his political rival, I would be lost in an era over 14 billion years ago when this universe began in an inexplicable big bang and on how the ohenomenon called life surfaced on a pretty ordinary planet lying in the suburbs of one of the many spiral arms of one of the most mundane galaxies among billions of galaxies, and how it progressed to a level where, forgetting vast, immeasurable distances in time and space, the Kings of he planets, the humans, fritter away their energies on trying to rule over one or the other tiny fragments ( like Punjab or Korea or Iraq or Virginia etc) of this invisibly small among countless number of stars and planets. While my friend will be surrounded by second or third rung self-pusher local political activists, I will be sitting somewhere, unobserved, among a different kind of cosmic galaxy that will comprise Stephan Hawkhins, Einstein, Carl Sagan, Tacho Brahe, Kepler, Heisenberg, Niel Bohr, Capra -- among others.
And I will be taken to them by a person who can at any time decide to be large and limitless and everlasting ike the universe.
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