Handful of Water, Heart Full of Love
A response to the prompt, ‘Wild Tricks from our Ancestors’, from the publication Tea With Mother Nature
My ancestors called her ‘Bhumi Devi’, the Goddess of the Earth. She is the earth, personified.
‘Walk lightly on her’, they said, ‘and make sure that what you take from her, you return, in equal measure.’
‘And,’ they said, ‘beware her wrath, because there is nothing that can rage like she can.’
My grandparents lived by this tenet, this dictate of faith, and they passed it on to us. They knew nothing about renewable resources and the like, but they knew that nothing should be wasted. So they made little fables and allegories to teach children the Faith.
‘Never waste water,’ they said. After you finish washing the vessels with ash from yesterday’s cooking fires, and coconut fibre, throw the water away into the roots of the plantain tree. ‘And when the roots of the plantain tree get soaked and happy, the roots of the red amaranth which grows in its shade, also gets water, and grow.’ It is an old adage, popular with all old timers: when the plantain tree gets wet, the red amaranth sprouting beneath it gets wet, too, they were fond of saying. No watering pail, no hose pipe, only a handful of water and a heartful of love.
‘Catch only as much fish as you want: leave some for other people,’ was a popular saying, that had literal as well as metaphorical connotations.
‘Don’t try to sit on an elephant and break other people’s walls/fences,’ they used to tell us. A metaphorical and very ideographic way of cautioning us to stay grounded. ‘When the ripe leaf falls from the tree, the green leaf laughs mockingly, not knowing that it would be her turn to fall, next’ was a proverb which meant that all of us have good times and bad ones, so laughing at other people’s misfortunes is only paving the way for our own.
They have left, my grandparents and their grandparents: and the world is only now beginning to learn the simple truths they lived by. The ancient proverbs about water and fish, elephants and leaves, have proven to be remarkably prescient and astute.
©️ 2022 Suma Narayan. All Rights Reserved.
This was a response to
Shoutout to Kevin Horton for another exquisite piece about listening to one’s conscience, working hard, and always, always lending a hand to help people who need it.
