Susan Oleksiw

Review: My Head for a Tree: The Extraordinary Story of the Bishnoi, Guardians of Nature, by Martin Goodman

I have lived in India and visited several times over the years, but I'd never heard of the Bishnoi. I picked up this book because of my interest in the environment as well as India, and I enjoyed it but not as a scholar of India. In the end, the book's weaknesses are really the result of the author being unfamiliar with India's caste system and overall social/political structure, and unfamiliar with perhaps anthropological approaches.

The Bishnoi grew out of a devotion to keeping the natural world intact partly out of necessity--without the trees in their area, the villagers would either die or have to migrate. This is not an exaggeration. Conflicts with the local raja or landowners led to deaths, and stories about these confrontations grew into the stories binding together the communities we see today. There is some discussion about the origins of this group within the Jat community, an agrarian caste.

Each short chapter covers one aspect of the Bishnoi world--the main animals, particularly the chinkara, the inspirational founders of the group/movement and founding myths, main figures through history, and the like.

The book can seem disjointed but in the end I enjoyed it, learned a great deal about an important environmental movement with significant success coming out of a very marginal community in a bitterly challenging landscape, and its occasional links with similar groups in other parts of India.

I enjoyed and admired Martin Goodman's book "The Hidden Life of Trees, and this topic is not at all the same even though both are ostensibly about trees. It is a welcome reminder that the poorest people in India are often the most successful in starting and maintaining movements to improve their part of the country.

Unless you live in antarctica you have experienced some part of the heat waves plaguing North America. In some areas temperatures are 25 degrees above normal. This isn't a one-time event; the heat wave covers days and weeks, beginning in June and still with us in July.

Until recently I would have found this heat burdensome, a natural environment that slowed me down, my reading, my editing, my thinking through various projects. But at least I was still moving forward, or trying to. The worse the weather got, the more I packed into the coolest part of the day, which this year wasn't very cool. Even though I've lived in India, and managed to write and do research and edit my work while there, I found the heat in New England this year enervating. It's eating up my energy. But it's doing something else.

Unexpectedly I'm sitting still and glad to do so. Instead of the usual flood of ideas I can't get to because of the temps, my mind sifts through them slowly or ignores them completely. Time spent on the back terrace looking over the yard that still needs a lot of attention brings a humming stillness. The birds are braving my presence to get to the water bowl, and the squirrels are ignoring me as always. I'm just one more animal coping among many. 

There's something liberating in recognizing that we humans don't have to be heroic all the time—working in weather that is warning us to slow down, pushing forward when we've been given the gift of time to do just the opposite. For all the months, years, I've been worried about the declining population of songbirds, it hadn't occurred to me until this summer to sit still and find out who's still around or recently returned. 

I'm paying attention to nature, listening to the warnings, taking advice. And counting birds not seen often or at all over the past few years. The robins, cardinals, blue jays, and sparrows are always here, but now so too are the catbirds, goldfinches, black-capped chickadees, baltimore orieoles, red-wing blackbirds, juncos, and phoebes. In the stillness with only a light breeze lifting the leaves above me, the birds dart and hang and settle in a birdbath and ruffle their feathers clean with cool water. The rare times when it rains brings up the worms, something more for the feathered visitors to find.

This is usually considered downtime, when we're resting, ignoring work, but for me this might better be called uptime, when everything I see is brighter, more alive, richer. In my quiet corner of the garden I observe closely the business and antics of the natural world when its members don't know or care that I'm watching. I see them share, or not share, the birdbaths or a particularly productive corner of the garden. Finding this part of the natural world so active and rich gives me perspective, a sense of being grounded, but also with a clearer relation to the world around me. Downtime. Enrichment time.