dispatch from the plant underground1-8

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Dispatches from the Plant Underground

Rockwall in GBS orchidarium with Impatiens scapiflora, ferns, lace ferns, mosses and other herbs.

Dispatch 1

19th

July 2010

Dear friends,

This morning an idea was born in a greenhouse full of rare plants, a greenhouse in a garden at

the edge of a forest in a biome that almost ceases to exist. The idea was simply this. To write a

letter to all of you together. And to keep this letter going in the weeks to come.

Dispatches so to speak, from the plant underground!

300 of you are in this mailing. Soon there could be 700 or more by the time I collect all the

emails of everyone we (at the Sanctuary) know personally, or have exchanged letters with.

Some of you, of course, have been here!



2 Dispatch from the Plant Underground

A few of you may remember the old Sanctuary newsletter. That was a fun project and a great

way to keep in touch with everyone known to us. Unfortunately, it was expensive to produce

and required trips to the printer in Bangalore. We did the last one in 2006 when Stefi was here.

Some years later we started a blog. Unfortunately, uploading time for photographs was simply

too long and internet connectivity was bad. It still is. (Bad.)

We thought today that letters (emails) may be a simpler way to communicate with all our friends

scattered around the world. Many of you have asked for news. Many of you wonder what is

going on here, what concerns us, how well the garden is growing, how the monsoon is, whether

forests are increasing or decreasing, what you and everyone else can do for nature, whether we

can grow this community across the world and so on.

I've been typically thinking of news in the form of articles on various topics such as: “the

plants”, or “the fish”, or “thoughts on education”, or “the politics of plant conservation”.

Somehow these don't show signs of happening. I find articles scary anyhow, they are so final,

and you have only that one chance to say it all! A letter on the other hand feels less intimidating.

It may also do better justice to the abundance of news that rushes around the place everyday all

the time, between plants and plants, plants and animals, animals and humans, humans and plants,

humans and humans, between all these and the wind, the rain, the fungal mat, the visitors in and

visits out.

###

For instance, here is today's topic of discussion. An old one for gardeners.

Plants in the greenhouses are too lanky. It is well known that plants in low light conditions grow

long and weak. It is also well known that plants in exposed windblown places are tougher,

stockier than individuals of the same species in a sheltered place.

Plants, it seems, like some action: they get stronger, stouter, healthier. They develop good form,

great character. They like the caress of the breeze, they like animals brushing by, they like fat




raindrops bouncing off their leaves. In other words, plants, like babies and puppies (and adult

humans!), love contact: they like to be touched.

There is a weird name for this. Thigmomorphogenesis. Thingummy what?

Thigmo....morpho....genesis. Touch....form....create.

While Wolfgang and other senior gardeners are experimenting with moving potted plants from

the big greenhouses to temporary shelters out on the hillside for hardening, before planting them

in the various habitats, I spent some time today indoors stroking the too lanky stems of ground

orchids, and tickling some others with a feather. I believe this should be done twice a day to

strengthen them. The Biology of Plants, an old and favourite text of ours, shows these grossly

different sized plants from the effects of touching (or not). You can google

thigmomorphogenesis and learn more if you like.

I was careful. I watched the movement of plants to the wind outside the greenhouse and tried to

mimic that delicate bouncing-but-tremulous movement. It was great fun, I got to see a lot of

detail. I also got a crick in the neck and a stiff back from bending over so much. I'm not sure

what the plants felt. I think they enjoyed themselves, I hope they did. For it to really have an

effect (for the thigmo-whateveresis) it needs to be done everyday, twice a day.

And then I played three strings on my favourite Am chord on the guitar-tanpura for fifteen

minutes or so. I do feel they love these notes. Who doesn't?

Weird as that may seem, please note that it was a heavy rainfall day, and I was escaping from the

big wet into a beautiful bright space full of amazing green beings, species of the genera:Pachystoma, Habenaria, Ipsea, Platycerium, Didymocarpus, Cycas, Impatiens, Zamia,

Tillandsia, Ceropegia, Begonia, Asplenium, Adiantum and many more. A nice change from my

desk and a damp dark workspace! I was joined by a dog named Polenta, two butterflies, several

grasshoppers, an ant-mimicking spider. a hornet, a line of ants and a toad. Spiderhunters zitted

by during the breaks in the rain. It poured while I was tickling the orchids.

###




Oh, and there's another item of news that's circling the Sanctuary, the discovery of two wild boar

nests out on the farther hillside. There are two large spindle-shaped grass mounds in a clearing,

beautifully constructed from grass and other plant stalks. There is a hole at one end, and a really

snug hollow inside. Sandy, Sruti, Anna and I went there two days ago, along with Tasha

(Rottweiler) and Polenta (half Daschund), who immediately got in. Suresh says boars come there

during the heavy rains, alone, in pairs or with their young. There are two of these boar thatch-

igloos on that same hilltop. Sandy has never seen these or heard of these, and that says

something, for Sandy has lived here all his life and knows a great deal about life on the land.

Abhishek, who is also an amazing naturalist, has never seen one, and he has travelled in a lot of

forests.

###

Those of you who have never been to the Sanctuary, drop in on our website (see below) and find

out what we are all about! In time, from these letters, I hope you'll figure out who's who and

what's what.

Those of you who don't want to receive this, drop me a line and I'll take you off the mailing list!

Those of you who have questions or suggestions, or interesting information to add, please do

write!

Those of you who know others who may like to hear from us, send me their email ids!

Best wishes

Suprabha

GBS website: www.gbsanctuary.org

http://www.gbsanctuary.org/







Dispatch 2

21 July, 2010

The forest near which we live

Hello everyone,

Thank you so much to all those friends who wrote in after getting the first dispatch! The

response has been incredible! I’ve never received so many letters so quickly, it's really been

quite wonderful to receive such encouragement.

Thigmomorphogenesis (or, as one friend referred to it: thigymorphing) seems to have touched

many people. I must tell the plants. They'll be tickled to hear this!

I've just come in from the river, it's swollen, wild and brown. It's been raining a little more, and

there've been some heavy short downpours and some brief gusts of wind. Sruti tells me we got

15 cms in the last two days. It's more than the previous days but still far short of classic monsoon

rain for July. I think last year at the same time we'd been cut off for several days when the river

covered the Panamtara bridge. That's when Anna, Suma and I went swimming in the lake that




formed in the Manisseri valley where the cows normally graze.

When I got back to my room, I peeled off my raingear, stepped out of the rubber boots, took the

socks off, and lo and behold, there were dozens of tiny leeches. They were so small that I missed

a lot of them until they filled up with blood a little later. I had one behind my ear, several on my

neck, three in my navel and many more on upper arms, behind the knees and between the toes. I

just went for a short walk! Imagine what happens to the others who work outdoors all day in the

grassland, and the fields and so on! Imagine how many the dogs get!

Laly came rushing by to tell me something amazing just then. It seems that the experiment with

germinating the Pteris ottaria spores, taken from a herbarium sample at Calicut University has

worked, albeit just with one spore. This is now more than a year after we got the spores from a

dried and pressed (dead) specimen from a cupboard in the herbarium of the Botany Department,

a year of careful and patient observation from Laly, the very first set of leaves has emerged.

I'm not sure how many of you know about fern reproduction, I can tell you more later. But

suffice it to say for now, that this is quite an outstanding achievement on Laly's part. We had

first assumed P. ottaria to be a rare plant as we had never seen it anywhere in the wild. But

botanists from Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute (TBGRI) tell us that they have

seen wild populations of this fern species. The irony then, is that we took so much care to rescue

spores from a dead plant, assuming that the species was nearly extinct.

Anyway, it's good news for the garden. The really amazing thing is that Laly can recognize the

species at this stage, the leaf set is tiny, minuscule! To my eyes totally indistinguishable from

any other baby fern sporophyte!!

###

I couldn't send this mail last night, connectivity was terrible.

I've spent part of the morning tickling one set of plants in one greenhouse. I think for

experimental reasons I have to be consistent and specific. So I chose my row of ground orchids




and took my camera cleaning airbrush down and worked on half the orchid plants in each pot, on

the left side only. I then watched the garden gang watering the potted Impatiens and orchids, and

then Laly collecting seeds from Impatiens latifolia plants.

I talked to Laly about "thigy-morphing". She smiled knowingly, and then mentioned that she

notices a difference between the plants she waters and those watered by the junior garden crew.

She says, how you water makes a huge difference, how and with what attitude.

I decided to not tell Suma (who runs the orchidarium) which plants I was gently brushing. The

test will be if she notices a change! Besides I need to first develop a routine around this!

For those of you who don't know, I'm kind of the clerk-behind-these-genius-gardeners. For those

of you who don't know, not everyone in a botanic garden is a gardener. Here at the Sanctuary,

some of us are cooks, some of us are educators, some of us are fixers and menders, some of us

share administrative responsibilities (fundraising, auditing, public relations, correspondence etc).

Most of us are multitaskers but the species garden in particular as well as the animals, the land,

the vegetable garden and rice fields, require regular presence and observation, and good skills,

all of which build with time.

For those of you who don't know, I'm using my time this year to learn more about the "big

picture", about what's going on across the Western Ghats, and I'm now part of the core group of

the Save the Western Ghats Movement. I'll tell you more about the mission of this group soon,

it's really quite important. This means I travel a fair bit.

When I'm back at the Sanctuary I try to catch up with plants and animals and the river and theland. A lot of time just looking, walking, listening. And some writing!

###

Sandy and Sora (from Japan) and Baby and a couple of others have built a fantastic bridge

across the river at the end of the Manisseri valley. This is now the second one to be made at this

spot.




So I went with Tasha to check it out. I was quite astonished. It is strong, made of areca (betel nut

palms) and bamboo. I can't quite figure out how they managed to lift it up. Sandy says it was

really heavy and quite tricky. They used ropes and pulleys. Now six of our crew who come from

one hamlet, can cross the river in the monsoon instead of having to take a long detour. Sandy

says it was great fun making it. I believe him!

###

A last note. I've been wondering about having a pdf version of this newsletter. With

photographs. And maybe some of the replies. I can do this offline, it's easier than a blog. And I

can upload it whenever connectivity is good. For those of you who don't want to read this every

day, the pdf file may be better. It's also good for newcomers, to catch up with the different

threads of thought. Also, it's not clear how often I'll be able to write this. For now, it's whenever

inspiration strikes!

I'm attaching the first one for you, slightly edited. The design and title etc are temporary, maybe

you have suggestions!

So, this is it for today. I see Purvy walking by with pots of annual Impatiens. I saw Suresh

building a small wall when I came back from the bridge. I know Shailesh is weeding and

manuring the bananas. Sandy is out there too, planting fruit trees. Rain doesn't stop gardeners!

I'm sitting inside snug and dry with a steaming cup of tea, writing about all that to you!

Take care, all.

Best wishes

Suprabha




Dispatch 3

22nd

July, 2010

Fungi in the monsoon

Hello friends!

Thank you for all the precious feedback and support that have come in the last 24 hours. Thank

you for all the gifts from your own lives, the articles, the links, the news, the mailing lists, the

affection. I heard, for instance, that the Lake District in the UK received more rain in one day

than we did in two days. This means our rainfall is really bad!!

I'm going to try to keep this one short(er!).

There have been several very encouraging and helpful emails on this community letter.

Reflecting different concerns. Some like it hot, some like it cold and some like it in the pot 9

days old! I think some folks are worried about burn out for me (let us remember the world is

burning out much faster). Some feel they may not be able to read it at this frequency, of one a

day. Some want it as it comes!

I was awake a long time yesterday reading everybody's responses and finding out more about

your own work. It is exciting and energizing, this sharing between us.




But I'm not sure how to go about this!

I just think of it very simply. It's a letter to friends, real friends. It's about connecting and

learning. I find myself following trails in the garden and on the land every day, trails that reveal

such beauty that I come back and ask my human friends here about things I know very little

about or am puzzled about. This leads to further discovery and exchange. It seems such a pity to

keep this to ourselves. Learning seems to have no boundaries, it just leaps the shores and swims.

Likewise, I am so delighted by all that you have shared, I am astonished in fact! And now I can

tell the others at GBS about you.

But there's more. This sharing is coming partly out of a need to honour the lives of those who are

disappearing and to do something about the current deadly state of affairs. It's about the world

that is being massacred. It's about listening to all those animals and plants and rivers and humans

and asking together, what can we do? How can this insane way of living come to an end?

And then to do it! Bring it (hubris) to an end.

I see Wolfgang 40 years into his dedication to this place and to this forest and to this community

and these plants (a drop out kid who bummed his way from the streets of Berlin to India in 1967

and never left). I see Suma and Laly (women from here, this landscape, this part of northern

Kerala) for well over 15 years each, working on these incredibly rare species. I see Sandy (from

this very spot here) growing food for all of us, caring for the land, 10 years of this now. I see

Leela (from here too) feeding endless hordes of hungry mouths for 30 years or more. I see Latha

in Athirapally fighting against a dam for the 15th year. I know teachers who have been on their

feet for decades, working on a new mind, for a new society. I see young people, discontent,radical, defiant, rolling up their sleeves and digging in. I know writers, magnificent courageous

writers (big and small) alerting us to the real dangers that rumble down on us, that threaten to

wipe us all out. I know gardeners all over the world, growing life so all may live.

And yet the wild world is disappearing. If you live, like we do, at the edge of a forest you will

see this. So I'm trying to find a way, we're trying to find a way, to bring all this energy and

concern together. These letters are just one small channel that has the potential to cut deeper, so

that we all draw energy from each other and grow the ecosystem of friendship that is worldwide,




and to turn tables on hubris.

I'd like this to be a living thing. There may be a spate of letters, and there may be a sudden gap,

there may be a steady trickle. I am not sure yet. It would be nice if you all felt the freedom of

this too.

Obviously I'd like the letters to be read, but it's not about the readership numbers or the counter

on my Inbox.

In fact, I'd really like to bring in the work of friends who are doing these amazing things. You

must learn about each other.

Wolfgang was asking how the quality of the communication would keep up. I said I would have

to see. I think letters liberate one from stylistic issues, but quality will matter, and content.

Whether to one or to many, they have to entice friends into a sharing, into something they feel

like doing more than anything else right then! I certainly don't want people to delete the

dispatch as it arrives!

Take care,

Suprabha

P. S. I'm attaching the pdf file of the previous two Dispatches again. There were many typos. I get quite

dizzy on the computer, so it's nice to be able to leisurely make corrections and changes.




Dispatch 4

23rd July, 2010

View from the Water Tower on a monsoon morning.

Hello everyone!

Thank you for all those wonderful mails. The Sanctuary has been hugged by a lot of people in

the last 24 hours!

Regarding these dispatches, I think for now, I'm going to just write when I feel like it, which

may be everyday for a few days followed by a gap. Please feel free to not read, or to read now

and then. I rather like the fact that different people will probably read different dispatches. For

me, this is a good moment to get some thoughts out to whoever is listening. The monsoon is very

inspiring and it's very quiet, and very very beautiful. The home crew is down to a handful of

humans (and dogs and cows!), it's just us, with the rain and the plants and the wild light.




###

It was intermittently sunny today: a glittering and spangled brilliance shifting suddenly to dark,

sombre depths. It hasn't rained much at all. Very worrying. But when I hung my clothes out to

dry on the line, it showered promptly!

I had a Vitamin D binge on the Tower this morning. I haven't been up there in weeks. Rockbees

swarmed westwards right over me, three landed on my head. I reflexively swung round to open

the trapdoor and got thigh deep in the water (the 10 metre high Tower was full!). I do know that

swarming bees don't usually sting, but I was already standing on the second step and closing the

door over me before I realized this! Entrenched reflexes!

The south-west wind was fresh. The sky was disconcertingly blue with beautiful tall clouds. The

sunlight and warmth felt incredible on my skin. Several different species of butterflies were

flitting on the treetops, level with where I was lying on the lid of the tower. Macaques could be

heard chittering near the river. Three Yellow Browed Bulbuls and a couple of swooping Black

Drongoes kept me company. A raptor lazily circled to the north.

I saw that the Utricularia (bladderworts) were peeping out of the carpets of moss. I saw that the

moss itself was luxuriantly thick, juicy with trapped water and iridescent green. The ecology of

monsoon plant succession was well on its way on the mortar between the stones. There was the

dratted Eupatorium (invasive species) even, looking a little lost. The Oakleaf fern on the other

hand was looking good. Grasses rimmed the lid, swaying merrily in the breeze. Soon the Towerwill no longer be a vantage point, it will be fully encircled by the canopy of regrown trees.

Already several views are closing!

The Tower gives me a lot of thoughts on human effects on the land. When you are in the garden,

under the trees, in the womb of the Sanctuary so to speak, you are so surrounded by life that

you can forget the big picture, you can forget hubris. Go up on the Tower, get your head out of

the woods, and you have an instant reality check. Phone towers, land clearances, traffic in the

distance, lights in the night, fires in the dry season.




I remembered how it was when I first came here as a visitor 19 years ago, how remote and

isolated it felt then.

###

Today I was thinking a lot about history. I was thinking about origins and journeys: of humans

and others, mine, the plants, the tribes that have lived here for millenia. I began to mull over how

the Sanctuary began. A half hour later, after some dozing in the sun, a chain of thoughts started

up, and before I knew it, they started turning into a book in my head. I wondered a little about

the subject, this was not immediately clear, there were so many strands, who and what would it

actually be about? Would it be fiction or non-fiction?!

Where would I begin?

Would this story begin for instance in the rubble of postwar Berlin, sixty some years ago? Is this

when the Sanctuary grew its first shy roots? In the life of a boy-child in a one room tenement in

Kaiser Friedrichstrasse in Charlottenburg?

Or would the story start way earlier? Are the roots of this place older, and closer, did they form

as the forest rose out of the metamorphic rocks of Gondwanaland, as the Indian plate nosed its

way into the underbelly of Tibet?

Or is it that they are more troubled and complex, neither here nor there, are the roots in fact,born from a clash of cultures? First the colonial regime and its battles with the tribal chieftain

Pazhassiraja and Tipu Sultan, then wave upon wave of settlers who cut and cleared the forests

through the 20th century. Poor settlers from coastal Kerala who displaced the Paniya and

Curchiya tribes, the elephants and tigers and bison, the ironwood trees in their fern filled groves.

Lying there upon the tower lid, I figured that origins are by definition mysterious. And it is this

very mystery that teases my mind, threatens even to become an addiction. My own life in the

process could get re-cast as a fossil hunter and it worries me that my skills as a writer are not




equal to the riches rapidly tumbling out, from the land, from my mind, from the light. The light!

I guess I could just tell this story as it occurs to me. But I know my weakness, I will get

hopelessly distracted by the play of time with biological diversity, and with human history. I will

get lost thinking about change, metamorphosis and growth. This play, this dance, this suggestion

of the past into the present (and thus the future), always casts a spell on me, and I find that time

is a tricky river to navigate.

The purpose however is clear. The story of the Sanctuary (and all other such places) needs to be

told, in some manner, by somebody, as a gift to future generations. The gift is the hard-won

knowledge of forest restoration. The time will come, in fact some of us believe it is here

already, when this will be the single most urgent thing to do, a time when allying with nature

will indeed happen, when all hands will be on deck, like the rebuilding of countries after a war,

after apocalypse, after collapse.

###

I'll stop for today on this note. The night is well on its way. Frogs are ticking, crickets are busy,

dogs are howling, a gibbous moon rides into the sky.

To bed, then.

Take care, everyone.

Suprabha

P. S. I am attaching the pdf file with the first three dispatches.




Dispatch 5

26th

July, 2010

The old crinita pond, or the navel of the Sanctuary!

My dear friends,

Thank you to all who wrote those lovely letters, I've just been reading them. They warmed me

up immediately. Some made me chuckle, there are accounts of people "thigymorphing" their

plants! Thank you also for some incredibly sweet thoughts. I've heard from friends in

Edinburgh, Bangalore, Tokyo, Yale and Tiruvannamalai among others. Dispatch 4 seems to

have touched a lot of people.

###




If only you could see me now!

Shivering, with cold and bloody feet. Sitting on a wooden chair in a dank room, with a wet dog

sneezing underfoot and both of us dropping leeches by the dozen. If I don't collect the engorged

and slippery darlings now and chuck them out, they will get sucked dry by the

terracotta tiles. By morning there will be stiff and brittle leech corpses all over the floor, caught

in macabre poses. I saw one yesterday that looked like a melted man stuck in tar, hand

outstretched. I feel sad when I find a leech who died like this. It's a better death for them if we

feed them to the eel when we pick them off.

I've just come in from a walk along Sandy's beautiful new trail that goes all the way around the

Manisseri valley. Although I didn't see any fresh spoor, I like the thought that I've been in the

steps of boar, sambhar, mouse deer, barking deer and jungle fowl. Sandy and Suresh have been

telling me about those who walk the new trail (other than humans and dogs). Maybe Nilgiri

marten and civet run up and down the trees along the trail too. I saw a quick movement in the

foliage that made me think of them. The dogs went crazy of course. But I have bad eyes, I don't

see very well and I don't wear glasses, so I don't

know what it was.

It's been a wild and windy day. Not much rain, but it's dark. Cicadas have been thrumming for

hours. Out on the trail, while I sat for awhile on a fallen Albizzia tree, I was sure my ears were

being damaged, the cicadas were so loud. They get even louder as the rain approaches. This

build up and tension whines into your skull, displacing all thought, and then suddenly falls away.

I had to clamp my ears shut several times.

###

I've been in the belly button of the Sanctuary today. If the Tower is the crown then the old

Crinita pond is definitely the navel. This is perhaps my most favourite place in the garden. It's

heard many stories from me, it gets a lot of Dylan tunes as well. Wolfgang, Sirish, Lily, Laly

and I made it together, some 15 years ago.




It is also a habitat for some rare plants, a natural hollow further down the hill in an area that was

never cleared, but had some selective felling done, so it was open and bright, but with trees. It

was a cardomom patch for some years, which failed. Laly and Wolfgang decided to do the first

larger scale habitat reconstruction experiments there. It was red earth when we began. You

should see it today, how full it is with every kind of plant from the evergreen

forest, so many different life forms: climbers, shrubs, herbs, epiphytes and trees.

When we made it, it was my first time building rockwalls and stone stairways. We worked

during the monsoon. I remember Javier our Spanish friend was there too, and I remember we

talked about Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West" that week while assembling this 3-D

jigsaw puzzle of a wall with nodules of red laterite using hatchets and bare hands.

Why do I tell you about the Sanctuary's belly button? Well, I was weeding there today. I've been

weeding there recently. A small herbaceous exotic urticacine (in the stinging nettle family) has

taken over the "cliff", the paths, and the stairways. It is a pretty plant but it is really horrible

there because it covers the area meant for Didymocarpus ovalifolia, a rare native species.

There are thousands of these urticacines over there. They are tiny seedlings for the most part, but

some have flowered, and Laly wants to get them out before they set seed. This is a good job for

me, as I can take a break from deskwork and go there to relax my eyes. In the

monsoon light I find the most incredible range of the colour green down there, from bright

fluorescent shades to near black. Whenever I'm there for awhile, my eyes feel washed and free-

ed. I get to connect with different kinds of plants: Ophiorrhizas, Cyatheas, Begonias and

Impatiens, Pipers and Sonerilas. I also get to hang out with lots of frogs. Sometimes I see a small

raptor, it's a shikra I guess. I have to ask Sandy.

A friend quipped some time ago that my job description these days would include weeding and

writing!

###




I know I started off on the history of the place in the last dispatch. I've been thinking some more

about it. I indulged myself in a kind of time travel that I know no one else can take, it is so

peculiar to my own storehouse of memories, memories born from my own particular

experiences. I was beset with sudden doubt. Of what use would these really be to anyone else?

How would I or anyone bring out the real story, and is there such a thing as the real story of the

Sanctuary? Is this something we can all tell together?

The thing is, whatever emerges from the telling, will not be visible to the participants, the

characters in the narrative are not really visible to the characters in the place. So much of the

Sanctuary has been dreamed in the secrecy of our hearts. We don't tell each other

these dreams. We can't. We have different mother tongues, we are of different generations, we

are of tribes, of settler-migrant families, of hippie communes, of urban India, of rainforests (I'm

including the plants and animals). We are very very different people living and working here.

Moreover, we are all different today from what we were 10 years ago.

Between the lines of these accounts I'm winging your way, between the jottings I've made over

the years, are the struggles we've had with our own view of ourselves and of each other and

others' view of us. Our dreams have thus manifested often in quiet ways. Our actions of

course speak louder than words, the Sanctuary as it is today is far more than anything that could

be said about it. And this is largely because the shaping of our dreams and our actions appear to

happen without much conscious choice, or collaborative deliberate planning. We are hopeless

with mission statements. We don't have one.

Also the plants and animals have a clear role, as does the land. I don't really know how to speak

to them or about them (but I am interested). Often it is this way between humans as well, wedon't know all that much about each other or even ourselves. I think this is true everywhere, not

just here.

We don't strategize here in the way other places do. We haven't built an institution though we've

been around some 40 years, and more if you look at how long some trees have been here. We are

more than a family but less than a community. The latter implies a shared ideological intent,

which we don't seem to have, other than "can we all live on this earth without destroying life?".




Although, come to think of it, in its most basic sense, a community is just this: a group of

organisms living together. That we surely are. People, plants, fungi and animals living together.

If there is one thing that is common to all of us, we seem to feel our way through things. Not

very different from elephants grazing in a meadow, or amoebae in a pond, or the spreading

underground network of fungi, or trees growing into a forest, or a mixed foraging/hunting

party of birds. The Sanctuary grows and grows quite unknown to itself how it grows. This

sounds unsustainable to a lot of people. Or insecure. Maybe it is unsustainable and insecure. But

stop a moment, think of a forest and how it grows. Why should the Sanctuary be any

different, why should it be more secure?

Factually, it is one of the most life diverse centres in the country. It has thousands of creatures

living here. It has all this taxonomic and biological knowledge. It flourishes in part thanks to an

incredible net of humans connected throughout the world. This is the odd thing about the

Sanctuary. It has all these cutting edge aspects and yet it is such an amorphous and undefinable

entity.

Look at it from the inside and it's not clear what's going in. Look at it from afar, it is a place (like

some others I know) whose time has come.

I'll tell you more about these others by and by.

###

I'll stop here today. The night is wild one moment and quiet another. There is wind and rain. I

hear only one frog. No crickets. The moon is just a glint in the clouds.

I must go catch some dreams! I have a long travel coming up with our friends B&T, all the way




along the Western Ghats up to Pune, in the rain. Need to sleep!

I guess this means fewer dispatches for a while!

Take care, all.

Suprabha

P. S. I' ve attached the next pdf file of the first four dispatches. I forgot to caption the last

photograph. It is a view from the Tower during the monsoon!




Dispatch 6

2nd

August 2010

Dear friends,

I am hugely embarrassed to have sent out the incomplete draft of Dispatch 6, as opposed to this

one, especially after working on it so much, and also to have open copied everyone. All that

came from running low on battery while getting sudden momentary connectivity. I made a

wrong choice and uploaded the wrong draft with a gun to my head! I hope you've all ignored the

previous one and that you take a little more time to look into this version here.

In a way it's good all that happened. It reflects certain issues that plague us all! You also get to

see work in progress!

###




I wanted to thank all those who had written in, many different people this time, many for the first

time. I heard from several old friends too, and this was really wonderful. I was away for three

days and came back to find a treasuretrove of sweet letters. I hope I managed to

reply to everyone in person. This dispatch comes out of very different sets of thoughts that have

been running through my head these last few days, different experiences and some oddly

contrasting issues. I'd like to take you through bestiaries, human nature, travel and

education.

###

I do really think sometimes that I live in a bestiary (a place of real and strange animals, a book or

compendium of animals where every animal represents a moral lesson through allegorical tale).

Yes, a bestiary and not a garden. Or maybe I live in a bestiary in a garden in a forest.

Here are some fellow beasties I met today: several Pillbugs, 4 Fairy Bluebirds, 2 Hornbills, a

Ratsnake, a Malabar Tree Nymph, a Southern Birdwing and a Common Mormon; a troop of

Bonnet Macaques, 2 Scarlet Minivets, 2 Yellow-browed Bulbuls; three different frogs, a large

purple earthworm, many cicadas, and many more uncountable spiders, ants, wasps,

grasshoppers, bugs, beetles and leeches. I also met a hanging hive of rock bees. And some fish

and snails in the pond. And a Calotes (lizard) on a tree.

That's just me on a little walk, and that's only the animals I could see, not the ones I heard or

whose traces I recognized: chew marks and nibbled leaves, cocoons broken open, earthstructures and hollows, slime trails on tree trunks.

And that's in the rainy season. Imagine how much more is visible and audible in the dry season.

And that's a tiny fraction of what Sandy and Suresh (who is of the Kurchiya tribe) see.

And that's not including the plants, or the fungi or the bacteria. Can a bestiary include plants?

Why not? If a garden can include animals, then surely a bestiary can include plants.




Any of you also live in one? A bestiary, I mean? I don't have another word to describe a place

bursting with gleeful and passionate lifeforms. Today I was deeply struck by the passionate

nature of life. And of the rain and the wind and the river and the light and the swaying trees. I

felt it in my steps as I walked, and in my dream as I napped in a greenhouse full of funny and

intriguing plants, each a character in a marvelous story rich in detail, plot and meaning. If

ever I write a book it will be full of fantastic plants and definitely it will feature ones that have a

sense of humour. I think I'll also include plants that are genius strategists with undercover agents

and the like.

But, back to bestiaries.

Even the house I live in is a bestiary. Other than the humans and the rambunctious canines, in

my room alone, there are several large spiders, an ant-mimicking spider and a jumping spider (as

I write this now) and often one of those scary tarantula-like things. I chucked one

out yesterday. There is an itinerant brown cricket on the lintel under the eave. A pink and yellow

toad by my doormat, who hops into my laundry basket when the dogs gallop in. A large forest

cockroach with mottled brown papery wings who scuttles in and out of the gaps in the window.

Possibly a catsnake or two in the roof. Possibly a wolfsnake or two curled under the broom on

the porch. Two, if not three different species of ants, a ghostly frenetic one that loves the heat of

the laptop. Beautiful glossy earwigs that hide behind the books in

the cabinet.

There are many other visitors who drop in every now and then: leaf insects, stick insects,

brocaded moths, tree frogs, a dark terrifying cricket with huge mandibles and strong spiny legs;a gecko, crane flies and mosquitoes, praying mantises, a rat or two, and of course

fleas with the dogs. The other night a bat flew in (and out).

Many nights I hear the long high pitched whistle of the Slender Loris as she traverses the wood,

upslope from my room. I feel strangely at peace when I hear the loris. Many nights when it is not

raining I hear soft hoots and gurgles, tickings and chitterings, maybe Nightjars,

maybe Tinkling Frogs, maybe Bandicoot rats. Some dawns the Whistling Thrush and the Puff

throated Babbler sing me out of my sleep.




And that's not to mention: the shrews and caecilians and civets and King Cobras and wild boar

and Brown Fish Owls and many many more that I rarely see or have never seen, but only heard

stories of.

###

I've been with friends in Coorg for three days. Coorg is the district just north of here, in the state

of Karnataka. I often think of Wayanad as the poor cousin of Coorg. Similar landscapes, similar

agriculture. But Wayanad looks chewed up, as the landholding size is very small, a few acres.

The estates of Coorg tend to be at least 20 acres in size. And many are several hundred acres. As

a result the landscape appears different in texture and patchiness between the two districts.

Our friends, Sujata, Annu and Maya have a lovely place called Rainforest Retreat near Madikeri.

I really like going there because I get another view into the same region, and I get to spend time

with people who care about forests but do something quite different. People

who have other talents and understandings. Friends who generously share their passions and

concerns and wear their wisdom lightly.

Their land has three little valleys, steep sided hills, wonderful trees laden with epiphytes, clear

streams adorned by ferns, and also a coffee and cardamom plantation, as well as fruit orchards,

and a great variety of spices.

I find when I spend time with Sujata and Annu, I start speaking a slightly different language and

I start to listen to slightly different aspects of the same things. I enter the fascinating

dimension of proteins, polypeptides, alcohols and asterases, acids, pheromones, volatile organic

compounds, amines, bacteria, fungi, sugars, viruses and the whole business of pathogens and

disease. I enter the world of biochemistry, signalling systems, rapidfire

exchanges between plants and insects, plants and plants, between soil organisms and plants,

between soil minerals, soil organic matter and organisms. I enter the exquisite dimension of

smell as revealed by Sujata's frequent urgings, "smell this!".




I usually feel ignorant, inadequate and hopelessly lost. The detail of things unseen overwhelms

me. Nevertheless I always find it refreshing even if a little daunting, this biochemical world. I

also find it restful sometimes, just hearing about all this great intelligence at work.

The conversations this time that were steered by young Maya touched upon other unseen

magical things: that were more my zone of comfort and equal fascination. Maya is currently

studying (and writing about) fairies, mermaids, elves and gnomes, in other words, the

biodiversity and taxonomy of sprites. Maya is also an expert on dolphins and whales. Maya

knows a lot about rainforests and the creatures that inhabit them.

Maya has grown up in the rainforest.

###

And so have Sandy and Anna. They have both grown up here at the Sanctuary.

Which makes me think of education, upbringing and the landbases we experience and imbibe

when we are very young. I tend to think of children as the fruit of their homes, neighbourhoods.

When they come up the Sanctuary entrance (the groups of kids who visit here), I watch their

bodies moving up the laterite stairs one step at a time, or maybe two. Some struggling, some

leaping. Some fearful, some excited, some bold and confident. Some watchful, alert, some noisy

and enclosed. So much can be read from these movements, about the places these children arefrom.

A lot is spoken by the body itself. States of ignorance and knowing are revealed as much or even

more so, by the body's engagement with its internal and external realities, as by what is spoken,

uttered. I am aware of this for myself.

It seems with children so much is just natural and effortless. Learning is effortless, language is

effortless, observation is effortless, play and sleep and relating are all effortless. I see this




with kids who have grown up here, how effortless is their participation in this complex dynamic

rainforest world, how at ease they are with plants and animals and trees and land and river and

fish. I see even with youngsters who are not familiar with this world

here, give them some time and they magically unfold into supple, dynamic new beings, shaped

anew by the forest and the terrain and the life they encounter.

But when all this is abstracted, made into a formal topic or a subject with boundaries, this

effortlessness gets lost. I see how some kids know so much about birds, say, from books or

documentaries, that they can't see the real thing. They are actually ignorant. This is even

more true of adults.

I see how too often, education as we commonly know it, enforces closure, a held state of defence

and fear, in people. Education and modern industrial life. I see how willynilly all that training,

and schooling and urban living, leads to people who shut out the rest of

the living world, which is daily in greater and greater peril.

Our educational work at the Sanctuary begins with ourselves as learning individuals, and we ask

a few really basic questions. What is seeing and how can we see better? What is it to listen? And

how can we listen better? What is it to relate to an idea of something and to the

actual thing, be it a person, a plant, an emotion, a happening, a process? What comes first: the

idea or the experience? What are the implications of either? What causes closure, shut down?

What facilitates opening?

I have been thinking about education because we need to plan out our next season's programmes.When the monsoon goes, people appear on the horizon. There is so much we can all do together.

I write this now, so that you can, if you like, tell me things you value in the area of education

and learning-in-nature.

###




Wolfgang walked up to me in the kitchen yesterday when I was perched on the side of the

woodstove, and said, "Maybe you should learn I Pity the Poor Immigrant and sing it to me". So

I learned the song and later we sang bits of it together and listened over dinner to

Dylan's plaintive young voice rendering these sad lyrics in a sad way. I later decided to learn I

am a Lonesome Hobo as well. Both songs are from the album John Wesley Harding.

There are days, months, times when the going gets bleak, even in the most positive of actions.

What could be more beautiful than working in a forest garden, what could be better than a life in

paradise, what could be more rewarding than working with living things? Very little,

but then when a bunch of people get together they can make the most beautiful of actions feel

difficult, sometimes like hell! And this is true in the art world, the music world, the conservation

world, the alternative world, the education world, any world where two or more

humans have to function together: lovers, friends, siblings, spouses, co-workers, family,

community, neighbourhood and nation.

The failure of the monsoon, illness, accidents, penury, violence, conflict, theft and vandalism,

war of attrition between egomaniacs, any of these could happen in a World Gone Wrong. And

our ability to deal with these effectively, greatly influences our work. These are of course, very

small issues compared to global climate change, state sponsored terrorism, genocide, ecocide,

the continuing extinction of so many species. Really small stuff, but this is what most people's

days are occupied with.

The Sanctuary is a place where the local and the global play themselves out, the personal and the

political, the individual and the collective. For the greater part we do very well, because all of us

believe wholeheartedly that we have to address these core issues on all fronts. But that doesn'tmean we don't have trouble or that we always know what to do.

These days here are a few things that trouble us.

We are faced with severe shortage of working people in the Sanctuary. Skilled and unskilled

persons. It is a huge place in some ways, because our charges are so many. How do we take care

of hundreds of thousands of plants, both indoors and outdoors, with the number of

people we have? Overwork leads to many problems. Typically organizations that run on




voluntary work are overstretched often. If you look ahead at the calendar, as Wolfgang and Laly

and Suma have to do, and plan the repotting and planting out and care of all these

plants, it is actually amazing that they are as calm as they are!

We are faced with age, disease and death (like everyone else in the world!). What happens when

one of us is no longer able or falls unwell or leaves or dies? What happens to all the plants?! In

a small team, even one person down or away, has huge implications.

We are faced with tough decisions amongst us, and the universal issues of working and living

together. The daily stuff: good most days, rotten, some. How do we listen to each other, what are

our non-negotiable areas, how do we get navigate our way through these?

We are faced with the juggernaut of progress and development bearing down on us, the forests,

the neighbourhood. When men in SUVs turn up on our doorstep enquiring for land to purchase,

men with a lot of money going after critical pieces in our watershed or bits bordering us, we

know the implications: skyrocketing prices, ugly buildings, and

the latest craze, resorts. How do we keep them at bay? Can we keep them at bay?

We are now and then faced with security threats, which happens when you "own" something, or

are protective of something, or have borders and boundaries, or assets, or causes even. Over the

years we have faced everything from theft to political scandals. Our delinquent

Rottweiler brigade is partially a security measure, thousands of people come here, there are no

armed guards, the place is pretty open. How do we keep the place friendly and welcoming but

strong, focussed and steady? How do we prevent damage of one kind or another? What are our

worst fears?

I am just naming a few. Some of you have asked about how it goes for us on a daily basis. Some

of you wonder about our future. Some of you are just worried about how we manage to do so

much with so little. The work after all is of a public nature and concerns everyone, but

there's only a handful of people (and a lot of plants and animals) holding it together. A handful

of people with a huge responsibility for very vulnerable species from a very vulnerable biome.

I would like to, if you don't mind, and I hope my colleagues and fellow Sanctuarians don't mind,




gently and slowly open out the many aspects, layers and interpretations of life here, life

everywhere. It seems to me, and I know Wolfgang shares this, and Sandy too and others

here, that it is very urgent and deeply necessary for all of us (you guys too) to address the

predicament our world is in. My own style is to be personal and political in a somewhat candid

and simple way. I tend to open all the drawers and look in as well as travel a lot and

look around. I'd like to start at home, but not remain here! Others will have other styles.

I was very touched by those of you who have written in about some of your concerns. I really

appreciated hearing about all that. Maybe someday we can have a forum to share more between

all of us. There is such an urgency for this.

Incidentally, the number of people these dispatches are going out to is more than I started out

with. Encouraging, but daunting! So I've uploaded through Facebook and Scribd, a pdf file of

four dispatches. I'll upload 1-6 as soon as connectivity allows.

###

Two last things: the monsoon was fantastic for a few days. The river swelled and flooded over

the bridge. I had to wade across with Sandy's help to leave for Coorg, and by the time I got back,

there was a boat ferrying people and supplies back and forth.

But now, today, it's very dry. Elsewhere, especially the coast, we hear it's hammering down.

Chaiti and a group of young non-resident Indians (from the US) were here for a few days as part

of the travel and education programme of Inspire. They were here when it rained really hard! I

didn't have much to do with them, they were busy with a lot of processing and

reflecting work at the end of their journey together, but it was great to have some more bodies

here in the monsoon!

And now the night is deepening. My clock says it is 23:55 hrs. There is some light rain. Falaafel

(dog) is snoring. Some frogs are active. Many small insects, mostly moths are fluttering on my




glass pane.

And I shall bid ye farewell and go now to sleep.

warm wishes

Suprabha




Dispatch 7

7 August, 2010

Checkered Keelback

Dear friends,

Thank you again to everyone who's written to me in the last few days. I continue to feel

encouraged and happy that these dispatches are read by so many, and that they are playing their

part in a magical web being spun between so many of us, by so many spiders with their

spinnerets and their invisible silk that is stronger than steel!.

I know some of you have difficulties with spiders, but I do love them!

***

I've just come in from a sunning session at the kitchenside pond with a Checkered Keelback

snake. I sat two feet away from him for 10 minutes or so, and he just lay there, his beautifulglossy brown body arranged in a figure of 8 on a bed of loops. Tasha (dog) came running by and




he just lay there. Leela (human) came walking by and he just lay there. Crimson dragonflies

flashed past his nose and he just lay there. Fish came right up to the water's edge, touching him

almost, and he just lay there. I inched closer and closer and he just lay there.

The warmth was just so lovely! It was really nice to be sunning alongside a snake, to be catching

some light and heat together, two long brown bodies side by side, after these dark and wet days

with very heavy rainfall. I wished I could curl up like him, and be as quiet, as still, just watching

all the others darting around. There was a lot of activity. It looks like many of us had the same

impulse, suncatching! Violet-blue damselflies, bluebottle and peacock butterflies; drongoes and

woodpeckers, grasshoppers.

Great morning to wash clothes and hang them out in the light breeze!

***

Today, I am thinking about other worlds, other possibilities, and about this smashed and broken

world, and hubris, and I'm mentally doodling my way through an essay I've been wanting to

write for awhile. In fact I thought about all this while pulling out Eupatorium weeds on the main

track this morning (FAQ 1: what is a weed? FAQ 2: what is an invasive weed?!).

I was asking aloud (the dogs were there, as were some young trees and a lot of birds), how do

you get rid of invasive weeds (read: entrenched and spreading destructive forces), on the land, in

society, in your mind?

Well, one strategy is to pull them out, by the roots! Not once, or twice but again and again and

again! Until they are all gone! Or until they start to behave themselves! This is what one would

do with Eupatorium, pull it out by its roots, before it sets seed, or cut it down before it flowers.

Other people may have other strategies with weeds, (read: destructive forces, things out of control, monster problems that look so innocent at first). I think Sandy, Wolfgang and I have

very different approaches with these.

The best would really be to have a wholesome and healthy place, diverse and dynamic, with lots

of space and time to grow and be resilient. Invasive weeds don't normally enter such places. But

these diverse, whole and dynamic places are very very rare now.

The next best would be to not let invasive weeds (or invasive anything: advertisements,

pollutants, certain behaviours, thoughts etc) loose at all. Just don’t let them out in the first place.

This is very important, but almost never happens, because the destructive nature of things is not




apparent in the beginning, is not visible to all, even if it is to some. Also, things often behave one

way at home, and another way elsewhere.

Or, once the thing is out, deal with it early, i.e. nip it in the bud. Another way of saying this

would be to catch it upstream at its source and not downstream. All these mean you have to be

able to see it early, in its nascent stages. This means again, you have to learn to see many things

in the first place, to discern.

Or, focus your energies on something different, such as stop the burning of tropical forests, the

destruction of habitat, industrial scale plantations, cattle ranching, mining, take out the dams

(and don’t build any more), let the rivers flow. Any of these would be a very far reaching

action, and if achieved, might make the whole issue of weeds quite irrelevant.

Or, find the point with maximum leverage, as some very wise people have said, which in the

case of weeds (and a whole lot of other things ), would be to stop this entire culture of

consumption.

Now, we will all wonder, I certainly wonder all the time, where do you stop this? Can it be

stopped?

Some declare it can’t be stopped: it’s in the nature of things. Others say it must be stopped, the

longer you delay the worse it gets. Some fear this whole question of stopping, ending: they fear

the suffering. Others are ready to suffer, because the suffering will be worse the longer you leaveit.

For instance, the question of Roundup has come up in our discussions on the weed Wedelia (a

pretty yellow flowered exotic). The debate was: do we use a non-persistent poison to kill it

completely, and quickly on the land? Or do we pull it out, and spare the water from the runoff?

Then someone said, what’s the point of using a defoliant, when actually the stem stays alive and

sprouts again. So should we just use lots of hands, pull it out systematically and thoroughly and

burn it?

Anyway, the gentle approach was used. Teams of people went out to weed, several rounds of

pulling out and clearing were done. And the uprooted Wedelia was burnt (Sandy says it burns

well).

For some time there was peace. But today, two years later, walk around the land, and look

outside, and you will see that we are surrounded by Wedelia on every side. In fact The Western

Ghats are being overrun by Wedelia, reported only some 12 years ago for the first time in

Kerala.




I see it everywhere, and the sight of it along all our roadsides makes my stomach churn. It seems

to me Wedelia mocks our puny efforts, our kindnesses, our delicate strategies, our local

sensibilities, our care for the water and the soil and people drinking downstream.

The thing is, it’s really important to not speculate too long. Because, as Sandy reminded me,

with respect to Wedelia, the consequences for the land, for ecology, for people are hazardous

with this pretty looking herbaceous weed. Wedelia is really threatening, a portent of bad times

to come . The awful thing is that we have to make choices which are not really choices at all, we

are forced to choose between poisoning the water, harming the land, upsetting the ecology with

delay tactics. Whatever we do we are doomed, it seems.

I think one must address the weeds in one’s head and one’s life and the land together, and also

in the gargantuan machinery that imposes it on a global scale with its military and political and

cultural drivers. I do think upstream is a better place to start, the source. I do also think, the

more of us who do it, whether we pull out Wedelia, turn education on its head, welcome back

native species, or oppose military and corporate invasion of any kind, or speak out, the better.

But for this, we need to talk to each other.

There are so many strategies, depending on who you are and what you see. Depending on scale

and place and time. Large scale invasion may require some brutal hacking back. Small scale

invasion, may be a far more delicate operation. Time is a huge factor. The longer you leave it

the worse it definitely gets in the case of invasive weeds.

Unlike nature, where, the longer you leave it, the better it gets.

Weeding has some great lessons to offer here. I really like it!

***

I spy on my desk today some books whose authors I have a personal connection with, authors

who have deeply influenced me, who have turned my life in critical ways. I've been re-reading

them, engaging with their thought quite intensely since a few days. I feel today is a good day to

introduce you all to them, as I am so immersed in their work right now, along with the question

of invasive weeds. They are all part of this place or my life or thinking in one way or another.

Before doing this I want to just mention that the list of close friends doing exceptional work is

quite long! I'd like to be able to introduce everyone in a spontaneous way, whenever it seems

appropriate, as the nature of this dispatch is to do with observations, work and thoughts from the

day.

Each of these four author-friends shines a startling and very clear light on the state of things, on




the world as is today, (as has been for 10,000 years), on human nature, on nature. All four also

talk about hubris, ending hubris, bringing the machinery of insanity to an end, whether it is in

your head, in your heart, in your family, in your community or in your world. All talk about

roots of the crisis, all address this question in radical ways, radical language, radical action (and

I am using this word as in: original, fundamental, as in: root). And all have lived it, or live it (in

very very different ways!).

For those of you who can't see the connection between all of them or wonder how I mention

them all in one breath, well, just think of it like this for now: they (or their work), are among the

friends I reach to (other than the forest) when I want to examine things very deeply. I also want

to make it clear that it's not about agreeing necessarily with every thing that has been said by any

of them, but about engaging very closely with the issues they articulate, a few of which I've just

mentioned, and the core ones being: seeing/listening, love and action.

I also want to say these are not the only people I know with these concerns, there are many

others. But three of these friends can be found through Amazon.com!

***

Arundhati Roy needs no introduction. But it may be that one or more of you have not read her

work. Please read God of Small Things (you'll learn about Kerala!), and please get hold of one

of the following compilations of essays of hers: The Algebra of Infinite Justice; Shape of the

Beast; An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire. Arundhati has been big sister to me and great

support in very many ways. When I want to know what's going on in the world, I don't turn on

the news, or snatch the headlines from the Indian Express, I call her and ask where she's been

and what she sees. Her work and our friendship, as with the others I mention here today, are part

of my journey into seeing and listening. And love, and action.

J. Krishnamurti: sage, philosopher, educator. I met K (as he was often called) several times when

a student of Rishi Valley and Brockwood Park in the 80s, the years just before he died. I think of

him sometimes as one of the kindest persons I've ever known and at other times as an out and

out revolutionary, one that cannot be categorized simplistically as inner and spiritual as different

from outer and activist. I think K also needs no introduction. But I've occasionally met people

who've not heard of him and if you haven't, I recommend that you look through the online

archive of his work or contact the Krishnamurti Foundations or the schools in America, UK and

India, or the centres all over the world.

I always remember one question Krishnamurti asked us students back then. It was simply this:

"what do you love?". This alone took me to nature and eventually brought me here to theSanctuary and rooted me here. Yesterday I read him to see what he had to say about: action.




(Love and action. Seeing and action.).

Derrick Jensen, author of Language Older than Words, Endgame and Culture of Make Believe

and many more books. I was first introduced to his thought through a young American volunteer

who came by here some years ago who read my clumsy writings back then, and urged me to get

hold of Language. Then I came across an article by him while last travelling overseas. And then,

thanks to Sujata, I read Language in Coorg last Christmas. And since then Derrick and I are

friends. What struck me was the incredible reach of Derrick's writing, from exquisite details of

the natural world to the manifestation of abuse, violence and insanity at every level of human

society. Please visit Derrick's website www.derrickjensen.org and please do read Language,

Endgame and Culture. With Derrick, the same questions speak to me: What do you love? What

is listening? What is action?

***

Wolfgang Theuerkauf is the only one who might need an introduction. Not many people know

Wolfgang exists. Sometimes he too forgets he exists (as a human). Sometimes it seems, he

thinks he is a plant. Somedays I too think he is a plant, a tree perhaps. A tree around whom so

many of us have lived, grown, and found a niche. A banyan tree, home to so many creatures big

and small, a tree who can grow on and on, whether there is a central structure or not.

Wolfgang is the author of this place, The Sanctuary, this rustling, squeaking, whirring, living

compendium of human and non-human beings. Of all, this is the book I am most intimate with, it

surrounds me and talks to me and tells me things all the time, and is ever present in my

imagination, my dreams, my thought, in this animate-body, in our community. This book never

lets me forget what it means to be alive.

He, the author, came in and talked to me a few minutes ago in his rubber boots, faded lungi, torn

shirt, wearing a forlorn look about the monsoon.

Most days Wolfgang is to be found at the bottom of the garden or on some far off hillside. He

doesn't write, hasn't had to since I came here, but he likes to tell stories. He definitely has a muse

who speaks through his work and life in a way that still delights me (as it puzzles and

confounds), even after 17 years. And this muse, through this living breathing compendium of the

Sanctuary, asks the same questions: on love, seeing and action.

Would you like to know more from him directly? You won't find anything by him on Amazon,

but you could read these dispatches, or better still come here! The garden is the only place where

you can actually read him, whether or not you meet him!

Wolfgang's thought will go to the world through the plants and seeds and growing forests,

http://www.derrickjensen.org/

http://www.derrickjensen.org/




through the birds and insects that fly from here, through fern and fungal spores, through the

spring water from the hillside, through the children and youngsters who swing by, through the

oldest channels of communication: attention, empathy and understanding. And maybe just

maybe, through a scribe, but very slowly. I think it will take another 20 years or so, before it

gets written down!

***

Well, having come this far, I might as well mention Bob Dylan, he's on my desk too. Lives here,

inside the computer, by my bed, in the shelves, in my head and some other heads. He is also

outside under the shrubs and trees. I keep hearing him all over the garden!

This mystic garden and its watchtower and its chimes of freedom, in a world gone wrong where

everything is broken, with its pitiful immigrants and lonesome hobos and working men and rainy

day women, all serving somebody, while it's thunderin' on the mountain, and the hard rain's

about to fall!!!!

Bobbie does have a line for just about everything, doesn't he? I can't really talk about him here,

I'm not friends with him. I also don't really know about love and action with him! Not yet!

But I can tell you about Mark Edwards and the Hard Rain Project which is endorsed by Dylan.

Mark is also a dear friend of mine! Check out HR meanwhile through Google, or visit the

website, www.hardrainproject.com. More about Mark and his work another time.

I have a long list of special people and plants to share with you! I have some incredible

gardener-friends and educator-friends (and plant-friends) in mind for the next dispatches.

***

Some practical thoughts on these mailings. From what I can make out, the mailing circle with its

sub circles is now perhaps about 1000 (my three lists and other people's lists). I haven't had

connectivity to do the admin work on all these contacts and merge them into a single dispatch-

mailing list, but that's approximately the number it's gone to so far.

I am aware there may be some who don't wish to receive the dispatch at all or to receive it so

often. My thinking today is to narrow the list down to the folks I know for sure would like to getthese as they are written. It is wonderful for me to write like this, it is very special knowing real

http://www.hardrainproject.com/

http://www.hardrainproject.com/




friends are at the other end of these missives. But I don't want to impose these letters on anyone,

friends and others! The beauty, really, lies in the connection, in the conversation between

friends! I will anyway post it also through Facebook. The compiled dispatches are available as

pdf files.

Btw, it can be dispatch or despatch according to Mr. Chambers. I prefer the former. A few of

you say it makes you think of military, or the frontlines of battle. Well, we are on the frontline of

something here, certainly at the edge of the forest it feels like we are.

Ask the plants who are wiped out by Wedelia, they certainly feel the looming threat. Or the

elephants who are cornered, or the bees who are going blind and dying. Or the fish turning belly

up in the rivers. Do you know how many species went extinct today? Derrick Jensen says 130.

That's grounds enough to know that something very very awful and destructive is going on.

I was deliberate in the use of the word dispatch. I think of it as something sent out from any

place where urgency is deeply felt, and thus sent away in haste, which itself, could mean "rash"

or "an urgency calling for speed"!

Until next time,

Take care,

Suprabha.....




Dispatch 8

Sept 27, 2010

Foreground: restoring slopes at GBS, horizon Van Ishwarakota, 2000m

Dear friends,

Hello!

It's been a while! More than a month since Dispatch 7 went out. Where has the time gone?

I hardly know where to begin today! How about with a huge Thank You: the biggest so far!

Dispatch 7 brought so many responses that I felt myself wanting to write to people individually.

I was reminded that friends are individual persons, each one special, each to be loved andhugged back and that circular community letters can wait for the moment. It was really nice to




do this with leisure and quiet, to touch base with many of you. I'm sure I've missed some friends,

my apologies for this.

As the weeks passed I started to hear from folks wondering if I'd dropped them from the mailing

list, or if I'd stopped writing. This of course is really encouraging to hear! But I'd like to reiterate

what I've said earlier, which is that writing the dispatches, as well as reading them, are

spontaneous movements. I'd like them to spring out of daily life here. I tend to find writing

difficult anyhow, so I really appreciate it when inspiration arrives, and nudges me to say

something. It flows nicely then. No effort, just a sharing! In the same spirit, none of you is

obliged to read this, or to respond, and I love it when you do. Either way all our respective

muses can lead the dance and we can relax and follow!

I had in fact started writing Dispatch 8 about a month ago, and it started becoming more like an

essay, and less a lighthearted offering from the day. While the topics are of great interest and

concern, I was getting into quite a loop of study and thought and slightly removed perceptions. I

suddenly realized I would have to do much more work to do justice to any of these issues. I think

there is a place for this, but perhaps not here. The dispatches are really born from the immediacy

of living at the Sanctuary, from the plants and animals and the light and the monsoon, and all

my human friends, the walks with the dogs, and musings from just this time.

Speaking of which......

***

I've just been daydreaming on the hill.

I've been out for two hours or so, on Sandy's lovely granite bench that is set into the slope

surrounded by baby forest, looking out on old forest in the distance and Van Ishwarakota, the

mountain (more commonly known as Banasuramala), and a brilliant sky bereft of monsoon

clouds. I had Tasha (dog) for company. I also had my guitar, and a mug of home grown jungle




coffee. I was out doing what I always do in the early morning light when it's not raining. I was

out with one or more dogfriends, easing from dreamtime into daytime, warming up my vocal

cords quietly to the E string on the guitar, listening to the birds.

***

Let me share with you the vision that opened my sleephugged eyes. Bright golden light turning

silvery-white, a vast blue sky, nary a thunderhead, no breeze, no movement in the grass.

Hundreds of dragonflies in the still cool air, the papery rustle of their wings adding pizzazz to

the quiet. A Malabar Grey Hornbill swooping in the valley, caw-cackling as he landed, a pair of

Scimitar Babblers calling, and some Red Whiskered Bulbuls in the small pioneer trees just at my

side. The mountain was present and clothed (there are weeks during the monsoon when she is

hidden totally), today she had on a mantle of dark grey clouds, glinting with the golden light

from the rising sun.

The forest canopy in the distance was so clear I could see arrangements of leafs corrugating the

individual crowns. The mountain base so close I could touch her. As I watched, the clouds

slowly lifted and there she lay, Van Ishwara in her full glory.

***

I remember reading recently, in A Language Older than Words, that, sometimes it happens that

a person can recollect the exact moment when his or her life changed irrevocably.

Sitting on the bench, I remembered that moment when it happened to me. It was when I climbed

Van Ishwarakota with my friends when we visited the Sanctuary in the winter of 1992-93. I was

back from my year at The Land Institute in Kansas and traveling with Gary, Christina, Lorenzo,

Gopal, Michael and others from Brockwood Park (also my old haunt), in search of land and




nature related efforts in India. It was a reunion of sorts, many of us were close friends. We were

at the Sanctuary for 10 days, picking pepper, learning about tropical plants and tropical nature. I

was fully intent on returning to the U.S., I had a gearless bike left in The Land's garage, some

camping gear, a dream to bike the West Coast Trail and a return ticket by Lufthansa.

Wolfgang took us up the mountain on a three day excursion. Christoph, master carpenter, was

also there. As were George and Thomman, from the neighbourhood. It was a big group. We

piled into a single jeep (14 adults with back packs, karrimats and cooking pots), and drove the

old Kunjom way to the base of the mountain and started climbing.

Two memories from that trip stand out for me even today. The walk itself with its many

wonders. And the decisive moment that turned my life by 180 degrees.

Looking back I see more of what led to this, but at the time I was so deeply impressed by the

walk, and so in love with the view from the top, so enchanted by the connection of a garden to

wild plants, to elephant spoor, to wild forest and a stunning mountain, that I (apparently)

impulsively popped the question to Wolfgang as we huddled around a campfire on that cold

January night, nearly 2000 metres high, near a small seep in a grove, redolent with the musty

smell of elephant dung. Most of us had fleece jumpers, except for Lorenzo. George and

Thomman were in their shirt sleeves and lungis. Wolfgang had no extra protection, and also no

sleeping bag. He later told us he couldn’t sleep for the cold. It must have been close to freezing.

This is what I asked him on that firelit mountain night, belly full with rice gruel and dry coconut

chutney: “Is it possible for me to work at the Sanctuary?”

He replied: “Welcome.”

End of job interview, application and acceptance. What consequence!

My friends were surprised, as was I. Wolfgang said later, he didn't believe I'd show up, until I

actually did, in the first week of April, as we'd agreed. Return ticket binned, bike abandoned, a

new dream of the Western Ghats replacing the one of the West(ern) Coast!




A key aspect in all this is actually the mountain, Van Ishwarakota. I’ve since come to attribute

my decision to her. She cast a spell for sure. It was her, and no one else that worked on my body

and my mind that time, she who engendered the epiphany. I think she worked on all of us. It

was a special trip, one of a kind, a passing from one life to another for this group of friends, a

passing from one terrain to another for me. All my rationalizations about ecology and

rainforests and conservation are dross on the core. The mountain beckoned. I responded.

17 years have passed. In all this time not a day goes by when I fail to look out for her. And oddly

enough, in all these years I have never been up her again.

Maybe it’s time!!

***

Some days I am more aware of the fact that each of us here at the Sanctuary, is on some kind of

a journey, on a very specific trail. A trail which appears out of mystery, and disappears into

mystery. Sometimes it seems the Sanctuary is like what I’ve understood of the meeting point of

aboriginal songlines in the vast Australian desert. We are each: Mountain dreaming, Orchid

dreaming, Fern dreaming....River dreaming.

I do not know if this is appropriate to do, to borrow from another culture, especially when I don’t

understand the cosmogony and ecology and community life of that culture. I only know of my

struggle to represent things through the language I know, to find a way of speaking that fits all

that goes on here, all that I see, all that we together and separately understand, and all that we

together and separately, experience.

Simpler put, I have this sense of crisscrossing trails meeting braidlike in a forest, like the ones

we find when we walk the real forest. Trails of Elephant, Boar, Gaur, Sambhar, Suma, Laly,

Anna, Wolfgang, Tasha, Leela, Langur, Sandy, Hoomus, Sruti, Shailesh, Sora, Purvi, Janu,

Giant Earthworm, Valsala, Rao, Gussie, Supi, Falaafel, Daffodil Orchid, Whisk Fern,

Kallampuzha River, Vine Snake, Trogon...and infinitely many more.




***

It upsets me sometimes that every human being alive and dead has (had) a name but that every

elephant alive has not. There are 6 billion named individuals of the species Homo sapiens, and of

the approx. 20,000 Asian elephants, very few are named, or recognized individually. It used to

be that human beings , commonly and everywhere, could recognize individual animals,

individual trees, individual stones.

I could borrow from animists here, I could even borrow from the animist origins of Hinduism (a

reminder to counter the abhorrent Ram worship that goes on): what were the ancients trying to

do with their million names for god? Were they seeing species? Were they seeing persons,

beings, ghosts, fantasies? What were they referring to?

I think it was an attempt at naming and thereby honouring immense diversity, but went further,

there was it seems, an awareness of the awareness of non-human others. Of personhood. Of the

peopling of the universe.

In fact, the theogony of this land was so vastly diverse, there were so many gods and goddesses,

and yakshas, and devas, and spirits and asuras, and stories, referring to special places, to special

forests , and mountains, and rivers and animals and plants and beings above ground, in the sky,

and underground, under stones, in caves, in streams and lakes and oceans, that days were

needed to narrate even a tiny fraction of it.

Isn’t it interesting that recent scientific guesstimates of life diversity on earth is in the region of

anything between 3 million and 100 million?! Every scientist friend of mine I ask about the

latest consensus on species counts, shrugs his or her shoulders and says “it’s hard to say, it

could be 3-10 million, it could be 10-100 million, our estimates depend on the ocean deeps and

rainforest canopy and the fungi and the bacteria, and on whether the taxonomists are splitters or

lumpers. FAQ: what is splitting and lumping in the science of taxonomy? Want to know? Write

in and I’ll tell you!




Anyway, it seems in so many of our mythologies and cosmogonies, for peoples all over the

world, the personhood of non-human others was honoured through story, often colourful and

long, and fabulously intricate. For instance, the Kurchiya tribe in our area, take a whole night to

sing the tiger hunt, they repeat it in full detail through song and dance. Imagine how many verses

that would be! I remember driving four hours with Raman, a Kurchiya driver, and he sang this

the whole way and he still hadn’t come to the hunt itself. Dylan's longest song has some 50

verses I think!

Back to names: Jane Goodall named the great apes she came to feel close to in her studies.

Raghu Chundawat and Joanna van Gruisen named the tigers they followed in Panna. I remember

Alan Morley who helped reveal the birds of the Sanctuary to children, always talking about “her’

and “him”, (“look! there she glides!”), never “it”.

Btw, is there an appropriate pronoun for hermaphrodites yet? I’d rather not refer to monoecious

plants as “it” or to sporophyte ferns, mosses and liverworts as “it”. And “he” and “she” would

not fit either, nor does "s/he" really work. I guess until English comes up with the perfect neuter

personal pronoun for hermaphrodites , and one for asexual beings, “it” may have to suffice, but

only provisionally and in great awareness!

Chambers has the following on “it”.

It, it, pron: the neut. of he, him (formerly his), applied to a thing without life, a lower animal, a

young child, rarely (except as an antecedent or in contempt) to a man or a woman, used as an

impersonal, indefinite, or anticipatory, or provisional subject or object......

I have great trouble with... it.... for all the above definitions of it!!!

As I wrote the above paragraph I spied Wolfgang walking by. I called out to him: Do plants have

gender in German? He called back: "feminine!"

***




Do tigers have names for each other? Probably not the same as we have, certainly not Hindu

names, or Christian names or Indian names, or English names or Kurchiya names, and

especially not scientific names. (There are no scientific names for individuals, the Linnaean

system goes as far as species, subspecies and race/variety, ecotype, and I’m not sure if it goes as

far as genotype these days).

But there is no doubt tigers know each other individually. And I bet that they recognize humans

individually, whether or not we recognize them individually.

Rom Whitaker wrote me a note saying that pigeons can recognize 400 human faces, a study has

been done showing this. Imagine that! Now how would one study this? I’m curious to know, I

must ask him.

Can you or I recognize 400 pigeon faces? Or elephant faces, or tiger faces, or frog faces? Can

you or I recognize 400 human faces?!! Other than those of movie stars and politicians?

Would you laugh if I told you that the plants can tell the difference between Laly and me? Or

would you want a study proving it?

I remember Sandy talking about frogs as individuals, I remember he had named one Freddy. I

remember Wolfgang seeking permission of rare plants whose flowers he needed. I know Laly

and Suma recognize individual plants in the hundreds of species they nurture.

There is a large glossy Nephelia spider weaving the most wondrous web outside my room. I’ve

named her Shakti and her tiny orange husband, Shiva. Oops another spider-man has arrived as I

write! Now what shall I do? I can’t really tell them apart! Should I spot one with non-toxic

yellow paint, the way an entomologist once showed me? Shall I name him Shivum to

acknowledge his similarity to Shiva?

Maybe I’ll just accept my limitations, apologize to the three of them, and let them know that it’s

no worse than my difficulty with the Tibetans or the Japanese or the Ladakhis. I get mixed up




real quick! I know some white people have trouble with Indians, we all seem to look alike to

them.

I think it’s all a matter of interest, affection, interaction, relationship, discovery, listening.

Names can then follow. Or not.

***

One of the little activities we did with children from CFL when they came here last winter was

to name individual plants. It was all part of a week- long study project on plants. We did a lot of

drawing and story telling. We covered wide ground from adaptive strategies, to behaviour (duh,

is there such a thing as plant behaviour!), diversity, ecology, politics of biodiversity, illegal

trade, biopiracy.

I remember thinking I was attempting something that could result in fantasy. But, to me,

fantasy was less the issue than detail. I was interested to see if detail and observation and

contact and affection could be the “drivers” of the class, rather than whether someone was

cooking up a story about a plant being sad, or whether it was silly to name a specific Begonia, or

a specific Costus (some incredible naming happened!).

But youngsters are just so much more perceptive and fun loving, that it took little to develop a

feeling/sensing discourse, rich in narrative and detail, full of questions, full of beautiful

drawings, and essays and really interesting facts. The intricate biochemical world of plantsrevealed itself with little or no trouble.

E.g. one question that came up in one session, a sharing on amazing facts about plants:

"Plants eat light".

“What? Plants eat light?!”




“Of course! Photosynthesis, silly! What else?!”

I know I’m digressing. This is a long winded labyrinthine topic. I have lots I’m wondering

about. Right now the issue is not the name actually, neither is the proper noun or even the

common noun, or even pronoun, these are part of various human systems of reference. The issue

is : the recognition of the life of that individual, to relate to each of these animals and plants

individually, as you would to a being, a person. A person with his or her own experience of

things. One that you can never know through the so-called “objective study” of their behaviour

alone. (What is a person?! Who is a person?!)

Try it out! Look at the plant in your roof garden, that squirrel running up and down your

apartment block, that tree you walk by everyday, name them and talk to them, then see what

happens to your world, how magically it becomes peopled most abundantly!

Please refrain from the question, can it be done for all living things in each of our spheres? Or

that even if it can, what’s the use? Cast aside for the moment the imponderable nugget that

individuation may appear differently in bees, grasses, lichens, fungi, bacteria, mountains,

humans, cows, rivers, dewdrops, corals, stars, planets and galaxies. Or in adivasis, soldiers in the

army, corporate workers and New Yorkers. Or in children and adults. Or in twins, triplets, single

children. Or babies in the womb and people before they die. Let’s not, just now, ask: what (or is

it actually who?) is an individual?!

Please just use this as a chance to check your assumptions about things. As I am doing now. To

realize that often we don't realize how we speak and think! And how these are related to how we

see, perceive, act upon and experience the world.

Just because the plant is not moving in the same time frame as animals, it doesn’t mean that

there is no movement. Just because plants appear to not react, does not mean that they do not.

Just because they are silent does not mean that they do not communicate.

I mean, why do we need David Attenborough to show us all this?!

Or why do we need proven findings from research in the high tech labs of Novartis on plant-




plant exchange or plant-insect exchange? Or the latest conclusions from years of work of field

biologists, who talk about trees signalling each other, or the intelligence of fungi.

Gardeners can tell you many such wondrous things, and so can indigenous people, and so can

children! And of course, so can the plants and insects themselves! Talk to them!

***

“Hello Shakti, I see you’ve got some breakfast. Keeping some for later? How are you today? I

see your web is worn and dusty in this corner already. Hey Siva, how’s it going? You’ve been

there in that corner since yesterday afternoon. All well? She talking to you? Btw I encountered

half a dozen of your kind , all spinning webs on the way to the river yesterday.”.

Or I could sit here and write about them , over there: A female Nephelia spider is seen

constructing a web on Monday Sept 27, 2010. 3 hours later this female is observed to be

wrapping a moth in silk. At 0900 hours the same female is seen to be touching palps with a

newly arrived orange male. The sexual dimorphism in this species is extreme. The population

density of Nephelias in Medium Elevation Wet Evergreen Forest is in the order of 200 per sq

km, extrapolated from a single transect of 50 m.

There was a time when I thought sentences like this. I don’t much anymore, unless I want to

demonstrate (to kids, mostly!), that there are many ways to speak about things, that a poem is as

acceptable to me as a song as a drawing as a field log entry, All these are valid communicationson natural history.

In our work with children we remain open to anything that invites and reveals relationship, and

mostly try to alert each other about ways of thinking and perceiving that come of assumptions

that there isn’t relationship, or that relating is not necessary. Mostly we try to encourage seeing,

and opening our senses and learning from our feet upwards. Finding each our unique ways to

grow intimate with these others.




Now all this is a Pandora’s box of issues: philosophical, linguistic, metaphysical,

neurobiological, proprioceptive, anthropological, psychological, Nepheliological. I am not an

expert in any of these areas. I’ll probably shoot myself in the foot if I say any more. I’ll

probably be canned as a loony talking to spiders.

I’m just sharing some things I’m wondering about today or find interesting about our lives here:

the fact that we do things like name spiders, and relate tenderly to plants, and have intimate

encounters with mountains, and attune, or attempt to attune to the soul of a place.

Speaking of which....

***

Strange formations are happening on the new shola hill, also called Ranjith’s land, Ranjith being

the guy who sold the place to us.

Using one kind of talk I’d say there is serious goddess worship going on there, laterite lingams

galore rising out of the fecund meadow brimming with rare flowers.

Using another kind of talk I’d say: heterogeneity of habitat is a necessary aspect of landscape

design for maximization of floristic diversity.

Talk 1: Wherever you go in these mountains, there is a soul to a place. It is the plane at whichearth, sky, water and life meet. It is revealed by the presence of very specific plants. The old

peoples recognized this and saw them as sacred. The gardener seeks to honour this by placing a

few large stones on a hill. They bring coolness and character, shelter and possibility for different

plants. They help us remember who is where.

Talk 2: Multiple parameters determine the richness and species gradient of a system. Random

sampling across the Western Ghats shows that aspect, slope, exposed rock, soil type, ground

water flow are correlated with the distribution of herbaceous flora.




Both talks mean the same thing (or do they?). Here at the Sanctuary we slide between both.

Often we are too shy to use the first and end up resorting to a watered down version of the

second.

I can think of one particular bright boy who might shorten the whole thing and say: Hey! The

hill is sprouting fangs!

****

It's also been a month of deep questions. By this I mean, I hear questions all around being asked

by more than one of us, to all of us, to the world, and I’m sure each to himself/herself.

Let me tell you about a chat I had with Shailesh in the kitchen one day, a Sunday afternoon chat.

I asked him, “Shailesh, what creates a viable community? A viable group? A viable relationship?

A viable world?”

He said, swiftly, simply: “It has to be mutual. And there has to be a leap of faith. And there can

be no force.”

I immediately had a lot of "buts'.

But what when someone does something that someone else does not like, when is this to becountered? Is it to be countered?

But what if someone is lazy, uncooperative?

But what if someone “misbehaves”?

But what if there is disagreement on what should happen?

But what if there is abject neglect?

But what if s/he is a stubborn cow, or a stubborn dog or a stubborn person?

But what if s/he is manipulative?




He said: “No game, no game. You can't play games.”

“But what if it is a game?”

“Get out of it.”

He said: “No force, there can be no force.”

***

24 hours later.

There was no electricity yesterday, so I couldn’t finish this as soon as I was hoping to.

I’ll end this Dispatch in bullet points with the happening News since yesterday.

Three of the plant team got lost on a steep mountain in southern Wayanad, and had to find

their way down in difficult and dangerous terrain in the dark. They came back dripping blood

(from leechbites), with scratches, bumps on foreheads, and hungry and exhausted. This morning

the raincoats were found full of steamed and dead leech corpses. Laly showed me the slimy

swollen pile looking like cooked fettucine.

Abhishek and Vasanth are here to discuss the removal of Australian wattle (exotic invasive

species) in the Nilgiris. There is discussion of launching the “Green Phoenix”, a restoration

movement to do with removing exotics, and bringing back natural vegetation in fragile areas in

collaboration with other groups. [An aside from Abhishek. He was in an open jeep in

Nagarahole recently and the jeep got stuck in mud and there was a herd of she-elephants with

young. One female charged the jeep, came running right up and bumped the spare tire at the

back. The jeep flew out of the mud.....! They drove away, she did not follow!]

Canine frenzy is ebbing, it’s been three weeks of sleepless nights and howling cavorting sex-

crazed dogs. Polenta and Tasha have been in heat.




Esthappen spotted a sambhar deer in the new garden areas. I saw his hoof marks this morning.

And then if I go back a few weeks: News from Aug/Sept

Jan Woolf, a Dutch epiphyte ecologist, from the University of Amsterdam, visited us with his

family. You may wonder what an epiphyte ecologist is. Someone who studies plants that grow

on trees, plants and also lichens, that form communities up in the canopy of the rainforest. We

had a lot of fun exchanging epiphyte trivia.

Devcharan of Wildlife Conservation Society spent two days here. He is doing his Ph. D on the

Nilgiri Marten, a small carnivore that is endangered, and seen in our forest. Dev also plays the

guitar, and I had a lesson from him. And believe it or not, just as I come to the end of this

Dispatch, Vasanth walked by to say he saw a Nilgiri Marten in the Manisseri valley, yellow

throat and all!

A new community member was adopted. Rao: an albino Great Dane, full grown, deaf, and

blind in one eye. He is sweet, and right now a handful! We lost Helmut, sadly, who suffered for

18 months, but he went when he wanted to go. The dog pack stays at nine.

Charles (old time buddy of Wolfgang’s) and Brenda, both now friends of all us, came by for

the second visit this monsoon. One a gifted artist, the other a gifted musician, it was an honour

and great privilege to have this time together with them. More on their gifts to this community

by and by.

Thanks to my old friend George Mathew who is now a conductor of the Brooklyn

Philharmonic, I was introduced to Chris Lydon of Radio Open Source for an interview. Here is

the link. Every now and then it happens that either a newspaper or a journal or (twice) television

and now internet radio, does a piece on the Sanctuary or interviews either Wolfgang or me

personally. The caveat in all this is: it tends to then appear as if the Sanctuary is a personal

venture of his or mine. Please remember it is not!!! I am thrilled to have met Chris, and to




reconnect with George. It was a wonderful opportunity to learn to give interviews, and Chris’s

questions were great. Please take a moment and listen to his India series.

And last but by no means the least, I’ve saved this for the very end: the big BIG news is, and

we are delighted to tell the whole wide world, that....... Sruti...... is...... expecting a baby! (And

Sandy is too!). And all the rest of us connected to this beloved wonderful pair. Like Sandhya

(Sruti’s mother) said, this is a community baby! Let's celebrate!

Be well, all!

Warm wishes

Suprabha

dispatch from the plant underground1-8

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