grow up and blow away..

There is something particularly exciting about entering a protected area. A space in which things are intended to be kept just exactly how they have remained for thousands of years. 24 hours from entering the eastern Sundarban region of Bangladesh, I feel the thrill of anticipation in the strangest of places…thumping in the pit of my stomach, pounding out of the balls of my feet, pulsing through the creases of my palm. I long to stand on the front of the boat feeling the fresh wind chasing through the jungle, over the water, across my face and reaching further yet than I can see…to become for a moment a piece of the environment, a living, breathing creature of such a delicate ecosystem. Not just a guest or worse, an intruder, but a very fiber of the landscape: intertwined with and equally dependent upon every other part for existence.
This is the life I want to live, perhaps not exiling myself to the jungle with the Bengal tigers, but in a community of equal dependence and belonging, where the individual, community and the environment are all intrinsically intertwined entities that cannot exist outside of the other.

As I write this, it comes to mind that there is a great Celtic symbol that represents this very idea and I happen to carry it with me, though I didn’t have it in mind before I started this piece…



(Those of you who know me well may be aware of my love for and commitment to this symbol on my ring) Each loop in the middle symbol represents an entity – the individual, community, nature – but they are all interconnected at their very core. It also comes to mind that the Christian tradition has used such ancient pagan symbols to represent the trinity of the godhead. Interesting.