Hello. Hi. How ya doin’? Wazzup? Yo. Hey. Buenos dias. Shalom.
Bonjour. Wie Gehts? Bonjiorno. Greetings. Salutations. Hail Caesar.
Pleased to meetcha. Good evening. Howdy. How goes it?
Why all these reasons to say hello you might ask? Yes. well… it’s
easily explained. especially for those endowed with the gift of
convoluted thinking. So here it is. Let us say you’re strolling
along and you meet a friend. You stick out your right hand and say
hi. He/she shakes it and raised the other hand and says slap me five
Benjamin. Two hands. two greetings. But what happens if you have
eighteen hands. Aw heck man. you need eighteen greetings. It is
logical. is it not?
Which brings us to the question-du-jour. Yo. hey… dude… what’s
this got to do with jewelry? Yes. well… allow me to elucidate. Let
us imagine that it is a hot sultry day in Nepal. It is October by the
English calendar. There is celebration in the streets. It is the
four-day-long festival of Durga Puja. You are in luck. As
happenstance would have it. you just happen to be looking for the
Slayer of the Buffalo-Demon Mahisha. Rumor has it that Cochise back
home is complaining the buffalo are running amok and he knoweth not
what to do. You grin inwardly. The Goddess Durga is the answer.
Now here’s the thing of it. How does one greet Durga. Do you shake
her hand? Or do you shake her hands? Hi Durga. Wazzup? How you doin’?
It is a problem you see. for The Goddess Durga–Slayer of the
Buffalo-Demon Mahisha–has eighteen hands. Hence the varied offering
above. How long does it take to shake eighteen hands? What if you
miss one? Do you start over? Does each hand have it’s own allocated
meaning. What if you see hello while grasping the upper left when
it’s meant for the lower right? Do you start over? Hello. No. I mean
Shalom. No. wait … that hand is Pleased to meetcha.
And that’s only for the greeting. What do you do when it’s time to
say goodbye? The only safe one here is Shalom. because that’s hello
and goodbye. Shalom. Shalom. You can’t go wrong.
But I’ll tell you this about Durga. She’s a pretty little thing.
Even with eighteen hands and arms. And I have a
sculpture/pendant/medallion in her likeness dating back to 14th-15th
century in Nepal. It’s gilt copper alloy inlaid with semiprecious
stones. 21 centimeters high. 8 1/4 inches. She epitomizes the triumph
of good over evil symbolically evidenced by the slaying of Mahisha.
She liberated the universe from darkness. She is the supreme
expression of power. She is the unassailable and the unconquerable.
Is it an accident that they chose a female figure for this honor?
Methinks not. I could go on. I really like Durga. But I have to leave
a little room for reader imagination. So I shall contain my delirium
and invite one and all to view Durga in all her multi-limbed
magnificence. You do know where to go do you not? My home page:
http://www.tyler-adam.com. Scroll down. Left side menu. Current
Tidbits. Click. And there will be a gilded Durga doing what appears
to be the Hokey Pokey. You do remember the Hokey Pokey. Yes? No?
And there ya have it. That’s it for this week folks. Catch you all
next week. Benjamin Mark