The Hindu elephant god, Ganesh, made of bananas
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Ganesha is the Hindu god who orchestrates between form and formlessness. He is the omnipresent energy out of which all things manifest and into which they will ultimately dissolve.
In the village of Sambalpur in Odisha, a small group of 11 people calling themselves the Natraj Club create a Ganesh sculpture every year. This one is made of five tons of green bananas and stands 27 feet tall. When the bananas ripen, Ganesh himself will be dissolved as all the parts of his sweet and edible body are distributed to the poor.
(Thanks to Harriet Sams for this story.)
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Trebbe is the author of The World Is a Waiting Lover and 101 Ways to Make Guerrilla Beauty. Her new book, Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty, will be published in Fall 2018 by North Atlantic Books. Her articles about people’s emotional and spiritual relationship with nature have appeared in Orion, Sierra, Ecopsychology, The Ecologist, The Nation, Harper’s and other magazines. She lives with her husband, Andrew Gardner, in rural northeastern Pennsylvania, a region currently under exploitation by natural gas companies.
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