Herder's Trails

A sufic syncretic metaphor for religious tolerance and trinities, or pantheism within monotheism,("He who does not recognise God in an idol as equally as in a mote of dust is guilty as an infidel") the story concerns 3 subaltern matriarchal tide forest cults, as the story talks concerns three women, one who stands for Manasa (Yasinia) the sybill of snakes, another for Durga (Avan) the prophetess of divine, cosmic energy, and the third Shiela for Bono Bibi, the saint and protectress of the poor against man-animal conflict; 3 cults practiced in the estuarine delta of the Bengal Sundarbans in Eastern India and Bangladesh, to which Islam was brought by the Turkish sufi holy men or mendicants who cleared the Norhtern parts of the jungle and initiated cultivation, bringing agricultural settlers into the region as early 1200 A.D. In this set of vignettes, Balochi and Kurdish Herders meet on a nomadic path and drive their herds together up the mountain side scattered with stones and ragged shrubs and clamouring, gushing streams. They learn from their surroundings and merge with the slopes like the immortals of the valleys -- what must be taught and imbibed from their past experiences inform their souls in a canny way of knowing, which pour like fountains among the foot-hills as they walk and climb. Crimson igneous rock banded with copper nitrate, algae and moss, sprouting with ferns and being eroded by the wind to smithereens and gravel and powder, blowing the dust that will in the rains someday turn to clay, quartzite glittering in the palm lines of the upturned hand. A wind blows from the West, blowing it into your face. They sit awhile to rest atop the cement tank near the garbage dump; It is 12:00 in the afternoon, or rather noon. They've already worked the whole morning. There are epics in the time of day to come. A Balochi goatherd named Sheila, growing up in a remote Nuristani village in Afghanistan, takes on almost more than she can handle when she decides to study to become a teacher, but grows all the more because of it, when she and her family happen to become friends with a nomadic Kurdish family who has come to graze their sheep on the same pasture as their goats. Shiela, Yazmina, Aref, Ahmet and Avan learn what it means to share both traditions and resources across ethnic groups, as well as how to learn from manual labour as well as dedicated study, building a consciousness that is aware, capable and flexible, and going to the human roots of universal knowledge, and the unification of body and mind and achievement of species being. This Shiela she carries with her to university and throughout her life as she goes on to be a teacher and waitress. A story of prose best read out-loud, of visualization of the nouns, verbs and relationships among natural and human entities described, it is an exercise that has the potential to transform readers if sincerely studied and practiced, and is written to inspire authors and readers to write their own stories with word and deed.