The Ground Has Already Been Listening
The Skanda Purana opens its geography not with rivers or mountains but with the idea that the earth registers what happens on it. Not symbolically. Literally. The text, one of the eighteen Mahapuranas, and among the longest sacred compositions in Sanskrit, describes certain places as kshetras, fields, in the agricultural sense: sites that have been worked, that have absorbed something, that will yield differently from untouched ground. The word is deliberate. A kshetra is not a backdrop. It is a participant.
