elephants

Elephants

1. Lord Ganesha is over my crib writing my path for me, notepad in hand. He looks down at my sleeping form over his tusk, and crosses out a line or two, adding a new detail here. Is my life headed as planned? May it be so, always so. Now he is holding my children when they are scared (and me too), holding us tight with his trunk.

2. Elephants have long memories.How far back do they go? Can they remember the trumpeting of mammoths and mastodons in the ice age, can they remember the earth as a sprawling paradise that they once roamed and shaped? 

3. They live as long as human beings,  they remember their dead and mourn them, they care for their sick and aged,  they work together as a family, looking out for youngsters. You don't mess with this vegetarian giant. They take revenge. 

4. Baby elephants have no control over their trunks, like a baby boy's penis.  They flop here and there. With their too large ears, they mock charge ducks and geese and run back to hide under their mothers when the birds cluck at them. They have eyes that can see into our souls. They ask what have we done with their ancestors. What are we doing to them now.

5. Elephant rides. I may have ridden one as a child around the houses in India, - my aunt's place. i'm not sure if it happened, but when i needed to lull myself to sleep, I'd call up that image. I felt so safe up there near the crown of his head, swaying side to side on his ambling walk, his hair prickling under me. Nothing could touch me. 

I rode again on my honeymoon. Thailand. After that I learnt how elephants are trained, tamed, torn from their mothers as babies and beaten and starved till their spirits are broken. 

I could never ride an elephant again.

6. I love the sprawling stone temples in India, with elephants blessing us for bananas, in Mahapalipuram, Azhagar Kovil. Now I wonder how they were trained too. The abject irony if temples tamed wild elephants with sticks and stones. Can we tie up Ganesha to seek his blessings? I hope not. I am scared to find out.

7. Elephants converse with earth and wind in a language beyond us. Born cartographers, they feel the earth's rumbles through their wrinkled skins, and trace the paths of ancient rivers to lead their herds to water and safety. As we in turn shape the land with our crude tools, we have become crosstalk in their dialogue with earth. How do they manoever the land? their history? their future? 

8. Elephants can uproot a tree with their trunk, and also pick a flower off a bush. Such might and gentleness in one being... we are blessed to walk the earth with them.. for how long, for how long.. more?.

9. The dinosaur has become a bird.  what will you become? you babe fought wars for us, been in Royal games, crushed enemies skulls. you have lifted logs and taken pathetic underlings for rides. 

10. elephant legend. holding up earth. 

11. in my dreams elephant holds me up atill