When the Squirrels Rehearsed Before I Did

A Page from My Garden Amphitheatre

Lalit Shastri

The music from that morning may be heard here

Before sunrise, while a dray of squirrels foraged through the guava tree, my guitar quietly traced the ancient journey from Do to Do - the fountainhead that's Do-Re-Mi, from which all music begins.

Without quite realizing it, I felt like turning my little garden into my own amphitheatre.

The garden did not become an amphitheatre because I carried a guitar into it. It became one because I finally learned to listen.

It happened naturally. I was sitting quietly, waiting to embrace another day, listening to the stillness before dawn. The squirrels had already begun their determined morning rounds on the guava tree. Birds were slowly announcing the arrival of light, while a gentle breeze stirred the leaves. Almost instinctively, I reached for my guitar.

Very soon, it no longer felt like an instrument imposed upon the garden. It became another voice within it.

I began with the familiar ascending spine - Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti, Do. But rather than treating the scale as an exercise, I allowed it to become an invisible thread around which the music slowly began to breathe. The notes wandered where they wished to go, rising and returning in gentle exploratory phrases rather than predetermined patterns. There was space between them, and there was breathing. Before long, I realized I was no longer playing to nature. I was playing with it.

Nature has never followed the discipline of a metronome. Squirrels do not move in perfect rhythm. Leaves never rustle in measured time, and birds rarely sing in fixed bars. Yet together they create an order that no composer can fully write down. When I later listened to the recording on my smartphone, I realized the music had quietly absorbed that organic rhythm. It had borrowed something from the morning itself.

That was the moment I understood what an amphitheatre truly is. It is not defined by stone galleries or a grand stage. An amphitheatre is simply a place where sound belongs.

My audience was already there - the squirrels, the guava leaves, the first breeze, the birds greeting the morning, and even the silence between their sounds. I had merely joined the performance.

For someone who has spent a lifetime observing forests, rivers, birds and wildlife through journalism and conservation, perhaps none of this should have come as a surprise. Nature has been my quiet teacher. Years spent watching it have trained not only my eye but my ear as well. Every landscape, I have discovered, has its own rhythm long before any human being arrives to describe it.

Perhaps music is simply another way of listening.

I remain a beginner with the guitar. Technique has a long journey ahead of it. Yet, slowly and almost unnoticed, the instrument is becoming less something I practise and more something through which I experience the world. That realization has brought an unexpected sense of peace.

I have begun to notice that music often arrives quietly. The squirrels pause. A bird calls. The leaves answer. Only then does the first note appear, as though it had been waiting patiently for its moment.

The idea, I have discovered, is not to begin the morning. It is to join it.

If, years from now, someone asks me where my music truly began, I suspect I will smile and answer, "'it began in a small garden, on mornings when the squirrels rehearsed before I did."

As I reflected on that morning, another thought quietly settled within me. My life has always revolved around three enduring companions - observation, reflection and expression. Journalism taught me to observe. Conservation taught me to listen. Music is now teaching me to respond.

Technical skill can always improve, and it should. Authenticity is different. It cannot be manufactured, nor can it be rehearsed existence. It has to be lived.

These days, alongside writing, I find myself returning to the guitar each morning. My little audience gathers without invitation. The guava tree waits without expectation. Together they remind me that hope and patience are companions, not opposites Perhaps life itself is much the same.

The final chord has not yet been struck. The silence before that chord is not empty. It is part of the composition:

So I choose to keep writing with clarity, to keep playing my guitar each morning, to keep listening to my little audience beneath the guava tree, and to let hope walk gently beside patience.

Every mountain I climbed rewarded me with a wider horizon, not a greater victory. Every forest taught me that silence has its own language. Every river reminded me that movement is not the same as haste.

And somewhere along the way I realised that nature keeps no score.

There is nothing to conquer.

There is only a lifetime of learning how to belong.