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but home, for me, has always been a place not to live in but to leave.
the forested slopes shimmer in shades of green I find difficult to describe to people back in the city. Light and luminescent as the first leaves on our planet. Dark and deep, the colour of ancient emerald pools.
Always this strange feeling upon arrival—of not being sure why I’m here, or whether I should be here at all.
Visit to visit, outgrown yet intimate, palimpsest of every room it has been over the years.
Meghalaya. A Sanskrit name given to a place that spoke no Sanskrit.
My friend is the daughter my mum could be proud of; me, I think, not so much.
And “plant bias”—our human tendency to underappreciate or ignore the flora around us—according to him, our species’s greatest, gravest crime.
Beneath our feet exists another world, I learn, a network of infinite biological pathways, through which trees share resources, information, nutrients.
A free market versus a socialist’s dream.
Papa may have been right, that there’s no language to speak of trees—but I find there’s no language also to speak of so much else.
Migrating birds, it’s been discovered, find their way by sensing the earth’s magnetic field. They see directions as lighter or darker shades in their vision; for them north is a colour.
Long and convoluted, they varied wildly from telling to telling—depending on her mood, characters would either fall in love or off a cliff.
I’m troubled, though, by a persistent question: Phi dei Khasi? I have never really known what this means
“And it will take you as long as you choose to walk—slowly or fast.”
“Phi biang em?” I hesitate. She’s asked not if I’m happy, or if everything is all right, but whether I am enough. And this is difficult to answer.
There’s talk of ksuid lum, ksuid wah, and ksuid suiñ, malicious spirits of the hills and water and air, but Oiñ says it’s been like this ever since those people came, almost twenty years ago . . . “The
They look around, saying, “Our nation is this—the hills we see around us, the rivers we know as well as our loved ones, the trees we call by name. And what happens if it’s in the interest of the nation—but not in ours?”
All people here, a woman said in the documentary, die young.
“The more they try to take it away, the more we will fight. Not because we are its owners, but because we are its caretakers.”
And couldn’t the question be what have you gained? Because to live in a city is also to live without so much . . . Silence, and darkness, and slowness. All these things that allow you to be with yourself
But lately, I have come to find something else—some peace in this cycle of sowing and harvest, this replenishment. Here, a sense of the seasons.
And thinking about it now, perhaps it hasn’t really happened overnight—the slipping in—but what has helped is being occupied, almost straightaway, in learning to tend and grow, prune and harvest. In this, I’ve found something I hadn’t anywhere before—purpose. Which sounds grand and exalted, I know, but truly, I’ve realized, it is merely to sleep well at night and to wake up knowing you are needed—by someone, a plant, a pet, a person, the world, yourself.
J.Sujata liked this
don’t know how to explain it, what it means to gather together and listen to a story. How in this simplest of acts all of us are participants, listeners, tellers, all responsible for bringing a story into existence and keeping it alive.
“We pave the earth and cover our feet, and we forget to place them on the ground.”
Is this her journey’s beginning or its end? Where will it take her? To what will it bring her back? What might she learn? What will she see anew?
“To look for treasure.” “What kind of treasure?” “I am not sure yet.” The girl’s pretty face is drawn in puzzlement. “How do you mean?” “Sometimes,” says Evie, digging into her haddock, “you don’t know until you find it.”
“To strive, to seek, to find, dear Evie,” her grandma would sing, “and never to yield.” “Never to yield to what?” she would ask. A smile, an arched brow. “A life bereft of wonder.”
anschauung. A word with no equivalent in English, but which could be interpreted as intuitive knowledge gained through careful patient contemplation, a “gentle” empiricism or “thinking with the mind’s eye.”
He accepted the essential role of the mind’s activity in rendering experience meaningful.
He is drinking in the air, the scenery, as though seeing everything for the first, and last, time.
“That my scientific work will be more important than the bulk of my poetry.”
He belonged to her wholly, and yet not at all. She offered him not simply a welcome distraction from administrative duties but essential support.
naming, labelling, systematically arranging. But to do this is to take away life,
“A plant is language. Yet all we wish to do is make it speak our own.”
“Object thinking turns all this, our sensuously rich world of living nature, into generalizations, categorizations, abstractions . . . seeing it as no more than a complex mechanistic system composed of physical entities interacting on the basis of impersonal laws.
but he wasn’t quite prepared for the switch from the intimate “du” to the formal, brisk “Sei.” This is the sharpest stab to his heart, and for a moment he feels a flash of hot anger towards her.
“Yes, but when it looks the most dead, in truth it carries abundant life,”
“It’s a continuous process,” urges Goethe. It develops for as long as it lives. And although it’s a poppy plant as a whole, it is never whole at any moment. Everything is sequence after sequence. “It is always becoming . . .” says Moritz. “Precisely. Throughout its form, it is always incomplete and changing. When something new develops, something that seemed essential before drops away. In growing,” adds Goethe, “it is always dying.”
In herbaceous wildflowers, especially in annuals like these, there is a marked and yet easily overlooked transformation within the foliage leaves.”
“Leaf is not something still and static and clearly circumscribed . . . it is dynamic, alive, it is always changing.”
Only after it is named is a thing known.
Upon my replying that this phlegm is a vegetable called Nostoc, I am, like St. Paul, judged to be mad, and that too much learning has turned my brain.
For months, the Laplanders have no names, but the middle of summer is Gaskakis, the middle of October, Talvi. And reindeer-fawn week, Ornjk, for that time of the year when in a fawn two years old the horns begin to bud.
I look upon all that I have named and see that it is good.
To be able to distinguish one from another among such multitudes, like ants on an anthill, is beyond my comprehension.
copper; rarely stone, on account of the weight. They own nothing they cannot carry.
