Whenever I return to the South Indian village of Valayapatti, where I first learned to speak Tamil and to which I’ve been connected for more than a quarter century, I help my honorary extended family pick flowers.
They grow beautiful white jasmines, for which the entire region around Madurai is famous.
Each morning we go to the fields and pick thousands of buds on the verge of opening, all in time to send them to the Madurai flower market where they’ll be purchased by flower vendors who will sell them in turn to households across the city.
Strings of jasmine will adorn pictures of gods, memorials to ancestors, and the hair of people such as my honorary niece, Vencika.
When the bushes are in full bloom, it can take the family and their neighbors an entire morning or longer to complete the task, and that’s with twenty or more people working. Each bud has to be deemed ready and then picked by hand. I’d be lying if I didn’t say the task can become repetitive, even with the scent of fresh jasmine filling the air.
But what can be overlooked from the outside is how flower picking is never only about flower picking. It is also a time each day when people talk about their lives and the life of the village as a whole.
If I want to get the latest news on what’s happening in the community–who’s celebrating what event, who’s ailing and in need of care–all I have to do is go to the fields and keep my ears open for a morning or two. I’m soon caught up on just about everything going on. It helps me to reenter the ongoing story of the community–the community of communities that this community continues to be.
It’s one of the things I miss most when I come home again. But the memory reminds me of the delight and pleasure that can arise in working together with our hands and bodies. In a time of increasing disconnection, carrying out a shared task while telling stories can be surprisingly joyful.
Which makes me curious. Do you have anything in your own life and place akin to this sort of flower picking? Or your own ways of connecting over a shared task?
If you have a moment, send me a note and tell me about it. I’d love to continue sharpening my own vision for how work can be more than just work.
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Together we can explore what Ezra Pound calls “news that STAYS new.”