पुण्यो गन्धः पृथिव्यां च तेजश्चास्मि विभावसौ।जीवनं सर्वभूतेषु तपश्चास्मि तपस्विषु॥
puṇyo gandhaḥ pṛthivyāṃ ca tejaś cāsmi vibhāvasaujīvanaṃ sarva-bhūteṣu tapaś cāsmi tapasviṣu
Word by word
The verse says
I am the clean fragrance of the earth and the brightness in fire. I am the life in every living thing, and the effort in those who train themselves.
In plain words
The list goes on, and it becomes harder to wave away.
The smell of wet ground. The brightness of a flame. The fact that anything at all is alive.
And then, quietly, the effort of people who are trying. That is his too, not their private property.
Where you've felt this · in community
The first rain comes after a long dry summer and the whole street is outside. Children first, then everybody. An old man who has not hurried anywhere in years is standing in it. The smell coming off the ground is the same smell every year, nobody has ever managed to describe it, and every single person recognises it at once.
Going deeper
Tapas — the heat of self-discipline, the effort of anybody training themselves in anything — is the surprising item on this list.
The others are given. Nobody earns the smell of rain on dry ground. But effort feels like the one thing that is entirely ours. It is what we point at when we want credit for how we turned out.
Krishna quietly takes it. Not the results of your discipline — the discipline itself, the capacity to keep going, is set down alongside fragrance and fire as something running through you rather than manufactured by you.
That cuts both ways and both are worth having. It takes some of the vanity out of being a disciplined person. It also takes the loneliness out of it. On the morning you get up and do the hard thing again, you are not drawing on a private supply that might one day run out.