After some time in the woods, you move differently. Rather, you move differently at different times. Sometimes like a night heron. Sometimes like an obstreperous elephant. Sometimes like a stalking wild cat. And sometimes just like however you are meant to move, as a person, a human being, determined by the arch and angle of your own two feet, your own nimble and supple strength and the fullness of your heart at the time. How you move depends on your awareness and the intensity of your purpose. And it is precisely how you move that shapes your inquiry.

The woods are overwhelming, but this is just a sign of their generosity. They are like the universe: mysterious, endless, brimming over with a zillion things. You expect to go a little mad. You do. You lose your anchor in the familiar to dive into the depths of mystery, knowing you may never emerge and that if you do you will be another creature. Your discovery that everything is indeed connected undermines your desire to be civilized, normal. Your apprehension of the unending, unfathomable power of Life diminishes your attempts to be rational. You stand in danger of abrogating your pact with your own species.

Your irrationality is barely disguised, but to you it is your principal tool of learning. You start to think like Moss. You wiggle your body like Eel. You hear animals talking and you find yourself talking to them. You feel meaningfully connected to trogons and toads. You spend hours, if not days just spellbound by the flicker and dance of leaves. You walk a particular trail at twilight. And people notice that strange look in your eyes.

This craziness, if it is that, is welcome. It is scary yet utterly enchanting. Once possessed by the forest sprite, you dance to a different drummer. Once the Wild Mind percolates through, there is no knowing what might happen. You chuckle with orchids by moonlight and who-whoop back at the brown fish owl. You are secure, at home in the wilderness. You feel the earth turn, turn and turn again.

And yet you know that the apparent unshakeable solidity of all this Life is only a mirage. The great forests of this mountain region are now almost gone. Our descendants will live in the shelter of concrete, or perhaps on barren and desolate wastelands of leached laterite. The work of wild creatures upon their lives, upon their minds and their own remarkable and once wild bodies will cease in a generation or two. And they too will be desolate, forlorn and wasted.

How strange that we are able to destroy not only something so ancient, but something so vital, so absolutely necessary for our own existence. At least a thousand different species of plants are rooted out of these wet western forests to be powdered and stewed and squished into an array of lotions and potions of great value. Animals are hunted; frogs skewered and fish caught way beyond any sensible proportion. Water, that precious substance, is overused or abused, turned into a lifeless thing, a sewer. Rocks are quarried and hillsides flattened. Swamps are dredged and paddy fields turned to banana plantations for export. Fires are rampant, and we heard this year that more than half of our district succumbed to burning. Cancer, in this rural area, runs rife from pesticides in water, soil, air, plant, fish and fowl. Traditional multi-layered, diverse farms that supplied families with everything from tubers, rice, timber, vegetables, fruit and spice, are being replaced by tea plantations. Our tribal friends in the neighbourhood, the people who know the most about these woods and who perhaps can care for them most sensitively, are displaced and desensitized, converted into agents of further destruction. Beautiful forested Wayanad, a ‘backward’ district in God’s Own Country, stands in grave danger of being completely stripped, even as it fills with resorts catering to tourists from Calicut, Chennai and California, by advertising its (once) natural, wild and unsullied nature.

So this is the scene. This is part of living here. Part of the story of this place.

But what I really want to say is that it is possible to do things differently. That the Trees and Frogs and Birds and Insects and Worms and Mosses and Orchids, and along with them the Water and the Soil and the Forest and the Farm and all the Sparkling People, can return. It takes some time, some work and some knowledge, some redirecting of things, some care and awareness.

But most of all it takes a big heart. Heart enough to leave things alone, to let all those magical Others get on with their job. They’ll gladly do it for you, in fact. They will replenish the earth. It’s their commitment, their god-given task and irrevocable destiny. Try asking them. They’ll always, always comply.

Suprabha Seshan, July 2004