Where every creed and race tolerate

The sunsets change with the change in landscape. The company of bird calls and dragonflies and all manner of other things that I don’t see bear witness to me witnessing their changes.

I know they are there, but I know little of them unless I were to go looking. And then it’s only a trained eye that can tell me this is that or that is that. But I love it anyway, this camaraderie with things I don’t know and don’t even know exist there. I have learnt more about birds however. I can spot a kingfisher or a caracara, because Nyla, the photographer, chases their flight, pulling up on my happily running self and shouting ‘jump in! Quick! It just landed on a tree.’ “Grrr!” But I comply because I can’t be having all the fun, and we need to stick together. The vague language is now normal. I know what ‘it’ is.

It had to be an osprey or caracara. I wonder what she’d do with falcons? Now I am unable to drive my car when I am alone without being distracted by a bird. I enjoy bringing back tales of how close they were to the road or where I saw them and what they were doing, like the owl on Trantrill Road that I saw and took Nyla back to see. We stalked it for months. It was always right there on the electricity line, doing its night hunt. And then it disappeared.

But those are just the things of the skies. The fields and savannahs have cultures of their own, as does the water. What lies inside the water and the fields are a lot more than the ones that show themselves to us but we can only go back day after day before we get a sense of the culture of the space.

There is no sense of the birds or the dragonflies tolerating us.

Of course, with our heads out of the way there would be more air space, but I run through them and they seem to go about their business fine enough and buzz into me if need be. Spaces begin to grow on you and you on them. It’s only the humans we have to be worried about.

So when we have murtis washing up on Tyrico, and hearing the inane comments about voodoo and obeah, it makes me desirous of even more communication with the organisms in the fields and rivers. It’s amazing that despite living together within an island for so long, we know very little of each other’s religious practices. If there were a general impetus to, at least be curious to know, that would suffice. But it seems, from Facebook posts and a large number of conversations with general persons over the years that there isn’t even a sense of curiosity among the laymen. People believe what they believe and that’s that.

We really might as well just be living alone. It is about time that we change our motto. Eliminate that narrow term “Tolerance”. It makes us into a society of insular thinkers.

Firstly, the murtis could have been from either one of the festivals, the Ganesh Utsav or Dussehra.

Durga murtis are not immersed for Ganesh Utsav, CNC 3. Durga murtis are immersed on the occasion of Dussehra, a period dedicated to the feminine forms of the divine. Ganesh murtis are for, well, Ganesh Utsav.

Secondly, this is probably a valuable message to the Hindu population that it needs to be a bit more environmentally conscious.

Immersing what looks like a murti made of cement, and holding a wire in hand, is hazardous to the general environment. Claims of black magic by some members of the Hindu community seem a bit far-fetched. An excuse.

Most of us who have witnessed the construction of murtis know that a frame is constructed first. In some cases bamboo is used to build the frame. So, wood sticking out of the back and legs more than likely would be the remnants of the basic frame. Perhaps this is where we should take a page out of the ancestral book and follow the lead of some of the South Trinidad Hindu communities and build man-made ponds for festivities involving the immersion of murtis. Leave the sea to its own culture. We already overfish and poison the habitat. And for the rest of the population, asking for the purpose of understanding, rather than assuming what happens during others’ religious festivities might be a more useful approach for life in general.

Blind religious belief makes us a bit daft sometimes.

As I was s ay i n g…the fields…