Article appeared in ECS Magazine, Kathmandu, February 2019
By: Susan M. Griffith-Jones
I am once again grateful to mighty Ganga for causing me to muse upon her cycle, thus off ering me basic teachings of life. For when I see droplets of water jumping out of the sky with no idea where they’ll end up, natural conditions governing their gravitational freefall within this system, either linking them up with others so that
they pool together and become one collective of water, or dissolving into the earth and nourishing it, or putting out fire wherever it may be out of control, and some that never even make it to the ground, but dissolve back into space on their way down, I connect the dots.
For we, too, land in a family, meet up with people who become part of our lives, our friends, our greater community, forming larger streams that join with ever larger rivers, and again, expanding as we mature, we swell, merge, and become a much larger vessel encompassing a greater amount of energy. In the meantime, we nourish our surroundings with our participation and quell issues causing trouble. But, just as local fishermen in the mid stream of Bihar have to pay mafia elements for everything related to the river, so we too encounter taxation and karmic debtors and are subject to barriers and pollution.