2025 Bhagavad-gītā Retreat
Post by Lilly
The Gift of Ganga — and Her Faithful Trash Collectors
We filed down to the purple-pebbled beach in the afternoon when the sun was just beginning to intrude on the shadows of the Himalayan foothills. There were about twenty of us, dressed down in wide sunhats, white boleros, and long pants that would shield our foreign skin from the unyielding north Indian rays. The Ganga roared before us, silty brown and brimming with white tips. Sweat was already pooling on my arms, knee-pits, and around my rubber-gloved fingers five steps out the gate, but ambition slid my discomfort aside. I rolled up my sleeves and stooped down to pick up the first of many treasures to come—a cigarette butt. I grimaced at the thing as it crumbled apart in my fingers and stuck it in my empty basmati rice bag.
As we slipped down the dimming sands, fresh river air filled our lungs. It was purifyingly cool and purged a few flecks of worry from the grooves of my mind. A distant hill wore a puffy purple hat haloed in gold by the setting sun. The mist hung low over the river, shrouding out the faces of many trees, preparing the land for its journey into night. The purpose of our evening sit by the river was to quiet our mind and honor the Mother Ganga—a great and powerful source of creation and sustenance for so many creatures. We honored the water for those who had forgotten, in hopes of the sacred ritual of remembrance returning once more to the human race.
The evening wind was beginning to bite when I fell out of my meditative state and realized the land had changed color and it was time to head back. As I stumbled back to the ashram, darkness shrouded most of the scene from my vision. Still, in faint glimmers of phone flashlights and late-night motorbikes, it was clear that ridding the Ganga of her plastic parasites would take far more than a brief sweep conducted by twenty foreigners.
What, then, could be done? The answer jumped out at me from my plate of saag and paneer.
After I washed my hands and sat down for my meal, I said a quiet prayer of thanks, sliced open a little lime with my fingernails, and squeezed the juice on my rice. I decided I wouldn’t fixate on the poor lime tree and its harsh exposure to the Ganga’s pollution. Instead, I thought about the floppy-eared cows I’d fed the day before. They’d contentedly scarfed down my offering of apples, bananas, and Mysore Pak. I took sips from a metal mug as my fingers worked their way around my plate and imagined happy little molecules of water, glucose, and flavonoids swimming around in that golden moon of sweet turmeric milk. Through a meager act of fruit-feeding, I had nourished the cow. The cow, through its milk, was now nourishing me. It does not matter what came first—the cow or the calf, the chicken or the egg. The seed, if nourished, will grow. And if that cycle of life is tampered with—if that chicken egg is infused with heavy amounts of hormone-altering lead, cadmium, and chromium—the creature that emerges from that shell will surely be twisted with mental defects, metabolic disorders, and physical abnormalities, if born at all.
You are the food you eat, the air you breathe, the water you drink. And if trash is what you choose to excrete in your hasty rush through life, trash is what you, your children, and their grandchildren inevitably will consume. In the soggy bottom of your Christmas casserole, in the creases of your Passover matzah, the ring of milk at the base of your cereal bowl—all will be the recipients of this concoction of carcinogens. This “royal image” may not cost us our lives, but rather the lives of generations down the line. By dooming the dirt, you doom the human race—and there is no greater sin than an act done out of ignorance. We do not have control over the corporations creating these single-use plastics, but we do have power over ourselves. We control what we consume, so choose to consume correctly. Take less. Give more. Clean up after yourself. Bernard Laod and Yevgeny Chazov in their article A Dream Unfolding claimed, “We must convince each generation that they are transient passengers on planet earth. It does not belong to them. They are not free to doom generations yet unborn. They are not at liberty to erase humanity’s past, nor dim its future.”
As I stepped up to the sink beside my fellow trash-collectors, something clicked—a ball-point pen in my mind. We were learning and applying this very formula right here at our ashram. Here we stood hip to hip, scrubbing down our plates after a delicious and fulfilling meal savored in silence. The answer was simple and survivalist: do your own part.
We took our time and took care, meticulously scrubbing down the cracks and rims with our sponges and cleansing all surfaces of food scraps and oil smears. We cleaned as we went, rather than letting a pile of dirty dishes accumulate in the corner of the dining hall and wondering who to blame the mess on at the end of the week.
My plate is your plate. My plate is our planet.
Lily