What it means to be stewards of the land

I write in the peace of the dawn, kept company by birdsong and tree whispers. The community dogs and I greet each other in the ritual morning bath of love. The orange light permits in me the articulation of memory. I have felt inspired to write these past few months. I asked myself, what is it that is giving me voice?

Ever since we started planting on the land, there is a renewed connection to the nurturer in me, the realization of dreams I did not know I had. Birth takes so many forms, the land is the mother, loving me and holding me in its wisdom, connecting me back to the feminine. I feel also the mother of the trees, loving them and caring for them as they breathe life. What a beautiful duality, to be the mother and the child. The land is teaching me to love and to listen. She is creating in me the aching knowledge that I need to learn to truly love, to be able to see her take the journey in the times ahead.

In JOI Anitya it seems we are constantly faced with the existential anxiety of having to give up our land. It is a borrowed time we have in building our community, we are hearing constant reports of the future of town development on this piece on earth that we guard now. The highway transformed into our own road nightmare, to be forced to accept the bigger, grander picture instead of our delicate, just emerging hopes for this land. I keep thinking of this small branch of the bougainvillea (Mother’s name: protection) that I planted a few months ago that is flowering now and feel this deep ache at the thought of this plant replaced by road. She represented a hope, a deep wish for life and soon she might trampled without care by the “vast noise of the creative urge”.

Paved roads are violent things. Wendell Berry meditated so beautifully on the difference between the road and the path. Unlike the road, the path is not destructive. Berry says, “it (the path) is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.” I walk such a path through the eucalyptus and cashew groves many a morning to say hello to the trees on Anitya land. Berry continues, “ a road, on the other hand, even the most primitive road, embodies a resistance against the landscape. Its reason is not simply the necessity for movement, but haste. Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape; it seeks so far as possible to go over the country, rather than through it”.

I don’t know where I stand in the seeming contradiction between what is called “pragmatism”, “reality”, the nature of growth of Auroville versus the wish for a quieter life, a more conscious one. I hold these options in me, even as the wish dawns for better questions, deeper reflections. I doubt that when the choices seem like the only ones, they are. They are the only ones we see.

I agreed to certain conditions when I joined these circles of communities, I thought I understood the nature of saying “yes” to temporarily inhabiting a land in order to preserve it and enrich it while the planning goes on for its future – determining its place in the ‘higher’ order of things, the Master Plan, the Galaxy or whatever interpretations it will take. I did not expect to feel so. I understand more now the advice to refuse to move from the land when the time comes, to refuse the development, the instinctive recoil in some when I explained the philosophy of our project. Only 5 years? What kind of community is that? What kind of relationship do you build to your place with that?

Perhaps ours is an ill thought-out definition of this term “impermanence”, we are children playing with grand words without truly knowing… It presents a real dilemma, to see your loss before you even love. Is it worth it? I could just build on this land, I could just grow some gardens and have community meetings and already start planning the next move. Why is this happening? For the first time in my life, I am feeling the other entering me. The breath of life, the growing sense of place, this overwhelming sense of connection to my surrounding. And yet, it comes with the awareness of almost immediate loss, of a constant knock on the door, asking me to move.

Perhaps it is the ultimate cosmic joke, to be a part of the “Joy of Impermanence” when everything in me is asking for home, for belonging, to really get to learn a place over the cycles of time. Or perhaps, this is the lesson to learn – to love when you know it will change, to love in the knowledge of an end, a transformation of expectations, a surrender to the divine will. To leave behind a richer place, to go in the awareness of movement between life and death, to not be in the centre of either, to observe, to help the beings be full and alive and to respect their passing and change. Masanobu Fukoaka comes to me now, reminding me that while I am the centre of this piece of writing, in reality, I will do better to not be the centre of anything. Perhaps that is the truth of what it means to be stewards of the land.