After weeks of increasing summer sunlight and dryness and silver silk cotton floating in the wind all around you, today there is a stillness, and a coming and going of the light. The monsoon will soon be upon us. There is something in the air that spells change, or rather a readiness for it.
The babies seem to have all left their nests. The barbets are rarely seen or heard. There is less activity on the trees around, except for the kites that seem to dominate the silk cotton tree. They are the guardians of this huge fortress. And oh, do they look it, these majestic creatures.
There are huge bee hives everywhere, especially on the silk cotton trees in the park. Is there a season for bees too? On one Sunday you see a bit of a hive lying on the cement platform. Its intricate perfection holds you spell-bound. To think that without these small beautiful creatures, plants will not be pollinated, and we would have no food to eat.
Last Sunday, a mother and child stop to observe a man who's going around the small banni tree to worship it. The child is curious. The man tells her it is a sacred tree and he is praying to it. She walks around it too, following him, hands folded. As they leave, the mother asks, don't you know the story of this tree? And she says No. "I'll tell you on the way back", she says and they walk away slowly, hand in hand, an intimacy you are privileged to trespass upon.
Today you see an old man holding the banni tree close and pressing his cheek against it. Which is exactly what you do with the silk cotton tree, every time. Two trees, one sacred for everyone else, the other for you.
And as the light comes in in waves and disappears, as you lie down under the tree and watch it, you remember the 35-year-old Siddhartha meditating under the Bodhi tree for 49 days, to discover the source of all pain.
"According to Buddhist texts the Buddha, after his Enlightenment, spent a whole week in front of the tree, standing with unblinking eyes, gazing at it with gratitude."
You can imagine why.
And you remember Pico Iyer:
"...The Gospels, revealingly, tell us little of Jesus' spiritual formation and concentrate mostly on his words and actions. The Buddha story, by comparison, places most of its emphasis on how Siddhartha came to enlightenment - the process (which anyone can follow, even today, in principle) - while the particular details of his subsequent teachings and wanderings are often barely mentioned.
Even non-Christians may know some of Jesus' words, while typical Buddhists may know hardly any of Buddha's specific discourses. Buddha is a precedent more than a prophet; and where Jesus came to earth as the way, the truth, and the life, the Buddha came to suggest that the way is up to us, the 'truth' is often impermanent, and the light comes and goes, comes and goes, until we have found something changeless within."
Pico Iyer, 'The Open Road - The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama'
And then you see this little squirrel picking up the laddu pieces one of the banni tree devotees have left at its base, and eating it from its small hands. Its prayer, its very life.
The full series here: http://whiletheworldisgoingplaces.blogspot.in/search/label/Notes_from_a_Ritual
Honey bees are just one of the many bees and insects and birds that pollinate the plants we eat. Refined sugar is toxic to squirrels, and every other living being :( If only enlightenment wasn't such an esoteric concept. Or being subjected to rituals that even time wished we had forgotten wasn't the sum total of the existence of sacred beings. After all even Buddha's way has its limitations. Not everyone has the means to abandon the living, nor the intention. Most find their heaven and hell in the daily struggles of the mundane kind. Which is a better way, who's to tell?
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