Like a bird or a tree?

The other day I was talking to a village woman whose family has lived here for generations, and who – like most villagers - has never been out of Goa. Don't you ever want to see the big wide world? I asked. She shook her head and her smile seemed to say: What for? Villagers here don't even dream of running off to Bombay to become Bollywood stars.

It makes me think they're not so different from their coconut trees: Rooted to the spot till they are felled by disease or old age and then, useful no more, fit only to be used as firewood.

Yet I can't help being bewildered by such passive rootedness, such apparent contentment in living each day with never a desire for something new.

Isn't restlessness in the very nature of human beings? Or do these villagers possess that secret something, which more restless souls have yet to find?

Is it better to be rooted like the trees or to be free as a bird?

There is no happiness for the man who does not travel, the Aitareya Brahmana says. Living in the society of men, the best of men becomes a sinner… therefore wander!

And since the beginning of time, like migratory birds people have left their homes for the unknown, crossing oceans and continents in search of a better life. Sadhus and mystics have always been wandering men. And whoever heard of the hero of a great epic finding adventure at home? There are those for whom wandering is an end in itself, those for whom sleeping under “the star-eaten blanket of the sky” is nothing short of heaven. People move to escape their ghosts and to ponder the condition of their souls and to find happiness.

And yet the Buddha did not wander the world to find enlightenment. He sat rooted like a tree for many months in the shade of a bodhi tree. If he'd been a Goan it might even have been a coconut tree among whose branches restless birds fluttered.