How many words could possibly contain all the love and marvel and reverence that the elephant gently hammer into our hearts, as it were, inadvertently?
And what else can we do but still make attempts to sing of their might and beauty sincerely? This is one such effort, if you may, on World Elephant Day.
Dear gentle being, a giant in the forming, we can only adumbrate the enormous adoration we have for you. What we can do, is to not let this love stay a velleity. What we can do, is stop scrutinizing what we feel and simply continue to feel what we feel in your presence and in your remembrance. What we can do, is both express and lock in a vault deep within ourselves our astonishment because you make it possible.
You, with your enviable calm, what commotion you arouse in us just by walking on the slowly swaying short grass! You, with your presence in human folklore, religion, art and literature, have stayed mightier in our world with the absence of all that in yours. You, unconsciously, how you become one’s companion in a solitary joy!
How commandingly you stand tall to blur out the grand meeting of the savannahs and the sky behind you! How grandly but quietly you make our vision digress from the ever-enticing trait of what we perceive as horizons! Tim, you rare member of the dying breed of last tuskers, how much awe and poignancy you instil in us by being that.
This is how you put our common understanding to shame and compel us gently, you giant majesty, to learn more, to learn different and to learn better. How could we say you are ‘dwarfed’ by all this expanse when you stand like a towering edifice? This is how you cajole us into learning anew, into new understanding. A grassland underneath a cloud-tainted sky and still, all we want to chronicle when we see you, is you.
Not so often do we get to find emotions in common with other animals. How fortunate we must be, to witness maternal love that makes not only the child blessed but keeps the whole world in its warmth. How heartening it is to witness matchless, gentle maternal love of the giant mother elephant. And how delightful it is to witness the little one’s vulnerable, endearing disposition.
Your solitude stirs in us… devotion… for a minute there, watching your divine form, we give the idea of ‘God’ a thought. Out in this world, where the land and the skies meet, your presence somewhere between them harmonizes all the mayhem between our inner world and the one outside. We don’t flatter you, oh, mighty being, this devotion is as sincere as the plain knowledge of how blissfully unaware you are of what you make us feel.
Like it’s that simple! That’s how effortlessly you bring simplicity even to our changing perceptions of grandeur. How you inspire us and stay indifferent to it all too tenderly! As though your moving form wasn’t enough, you enchant us with those tusks with their bashful curves! Look how stately you exist and walk around even as the forest thickets grow riotously all around you!
For you are not always solemn but frolicsome, too. It’s as though your happiness was complete by itself, without needing another to share it and validate it. Teach us, we humbly beseech you, to be as content… and light, too, especially when it matters the most. Like how you simply let out a whiff of breath and create a cloud of earth-dust around yourself and amuse yourself (while we ‘contemplate deeply’ on ‘the lightness of our existence’)
