beautiful cat 😺😺😺😺😺

beautiful cat food 🐭🐭🐭🐰🐰🐰🦊🦊🦊

[いけ｜1枚目のあとに @wwwwkkkk_57]

🏆【大喜利】

「猫に□□□□」

あなたなら何を入れますか？

[Cats with aura @Catsworldtweet]

My boyfriend came over to see my new kittens and this happened

[Anuradha🇮🇳 @ako660]

The Griot, and the Lion with the Heart of a Lamb

India and Africa have always fascinated me. Separated by geography, yet so often united by the wisdom of their storytelling traditions.

Dave Chappelle is one of America’s finest storytellers.

Growing up, his mother, an accomplished scholar of African culture would often tell him, “You remind me of a griot.”

A griot is the keeper of memory in many West African traditions. He was a person entrusted with preserving the history, genealogies, victories, falls and wisdom of a village. Before written history, it lived in the voice of the griot.

There is an old African saying:

“When a griot dies, it is as if a library has burned down.”

What a beautiful thought.

In India too, we preserved our civilization through the Shruti and Smriti traditions, through the Vedas, the Puranas, the Kathavachaks, the Charans and Bhats, who carried history, genealogy and wisdom in memory long before it was written down.

Chappelle’s mother also left him with another lesson that has stayed with me.

She would tell him:

“Sometimes you have to be a lion to be the lamb that you really are.”

It is one of the gentlest definitions of courage I have heard.

It does not ask us to become harsh. Strength, then, is not the opposite of kindness; it is often its guardian.

For the second we find no finer embodiment than Hanuman.

A heart gentler than a lamb, resting only at the feet of Shri Rama. Yet when dharma demanded it, he became a lion burning Lanka.

भीम रूप धरि असुर संहारे।
रामचंद्र के काज संवारे॥
The lion was never his nature. It was his duty.

Two continents. Two ancient civilizations. Different stories. The same wisdom.