The Land tells me .... ( a poem)

 

The land offers me a memory, intangible as it can be,

A memory of royal, benevolent Rajas.

I wonder who his Rani was and then I slip into the memory again.

Land is granted, temples built, and priests brought in from faraway lands.

I wonder if the Raja and his escorts come back today to witness what they bestowed,

Will they know it or even recognise it?

 

Lord Ganesha is the guardian of this temple,

He is still worshiped in his own little shrine, placed at the entrance.

Yet the main deity lies forgotten somewhere in the nether regions of the temple,

While their replacement is feted in the sanctum-sanctorum.

 

Human memory is so fragile and ephemeral.

Old is lost and abandoned,

While New is painted and polished.

We forget stories of the old and wish to reinvent every wheel again.

 

It is time to Remember the past and acknowledge it.

And let go our greed for new and nearer things.

It is time to Reclaim all that we already have.

And to sit with what we already know.

It is time to Re-examine the past with lens anew,

And embrace what we need from it.

It is time to Renew our lives with our connections to the past.

And forge forward without losing it.

 

It is Time for us to re - connect with land, landscapes, and the natural world.

In every small significant ways 

and also big, very visible ways.