 
So said Black Elk.
The Power of the World always works in
circles, and everything tries to be round. The sky is round, and I have heard that the
earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power,
whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The
sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are
round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again
to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it
is in everything where power moves.
What to do with the surplus?
We (Warli) are a tribal people from Western
India. We have been told today
that the white men, and after they went away, the brown men with white masks, always want
the correct things, and when they want our ‘development’, it is also the correct
thing. We tribals have very little, but we miss nothing, because we desire still less.
Others consider this ‘lower’ form of life, but we don’t know how to
accommodate surplus, because we don’t know what to do with the surplus. We work to
get our basic needs and to enjoy leisure, which for us is singing and dancing. We are
happy that you are now saying that sustainable development is what the earth needs, and we
feel it is what mother nature wants...only, we are often unable to hear. We are now
hearing what our elders have always
said. It is not as if we have suffered in silence.
We have also fought, and we keep fighting.
The central theme of all
tribal upsurges, much akin to today’s Jungle Bachao, Adivasi Bachao Movement, is the
protection of our resource-based survival system, not merely as biological entities in a
specific historico-ecological
niche.
Extract from an article by Pradip
Prabhu, founder of Kashtakari Sangathana, in DTE, August 15, 1995
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Black Elk, great holy man of the
Dakota Native American tribe,in 1930s
You don’t
need to hit on the head to realise that the world we see, touch, smell and feel around us
is composed of circles. From objects that are obvious and unmistakable to metaphorically
abstract ideas. Circles are everywhere. In Buddhist philosophy, the mandala of Kalachakra,
symbolises the entire universe in terms of planets and time cycles, as well as aspects of
our body and mind, and even the practice. In Hindu philosophy time is cyclical. Just like life. Things are born, they mature
andthey die.
Everything tries to be round. What does it mean to try to be round? It means, among other
things, that we want to be complete, as a circle is complete. Perhaps our most ancient
recognition of this is the Yin and Yang symbol — comple-mentary opposites fused into
one. To be complete is to be
whole.
Every atom of our flesh has been taken up from somewhere in the universe. We are,
materially and literally, one part of Earth and stars -the brahmand. A part within
the circle that Earth makes. As the famous science writer Carl Sagan remarked "We belong to the stars."
The carbon atoms that are part of our blood and bone were, until quite
recently, part of the bodies of living plants. So are we truly immortal? In some ways the
Earth is also immortal; we each consist of ‘stuff’ that once flowed through
other living beings, before we ate, drank and used it. We will each, in our turn, return
this physical material to the system. We ourselves are recycled.
Where there is life, there are cycles. If you study any living network, then
you will find that all nutrients are passed along in cycles. In an ecosystem, energy flows
through a network, while vital constituents like water, oxygen, carbon, and other
nutrients move in ecological cycles. The same thing withe the network of the human body.
Blood, air and lymph fluid all cycles through our body. Wherever we see life we see
networks; and wherever we see living networks, we see cycles.
Nature is cyclical. In science, a Gaia
theory is a class of
scientific models of the biosphere in which life fosters and maintains suitable conditions
for itself by affecting Earth's environment. The first such theory was created by the
English atmospheric scientist James Lovelock in 1969. He hypothesised that the living
matter of the planet functioned like a single organism and named this self-regulating
living system after the Greek goddess Gaia. In other words, the whole earth, rocks, water,
plants and all, is one living
being!
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