The Garden of the Gods; a Sri Lankan folk tale that transcends myth

The Horton Plains, when the Garden of the Gods appears once in twelve years.

They say twelve years is a single day in the realm of gods. In a Sri Lankan folk tale, when a young celestial being fell in love with an earthly woman, this strange time-dilation became the premise of his heartbreak. In this story, we share the folktale The Garden of the Gods and how it entwines with reality in a natural phenomenon that takes place every twelve years.

In the highlands of the island, there was a village girl of great beauty. Every few days, she went into the forest to gather firewood. Her elders said to her, “Do not tarry; the forest is not a place to linger; return quickly, that you may assist your sister.” 

But the girl loved the forest. She gazed long upon the trees, and she wandered about seeking flowers.

At that time, a young god came down to the Earth. When the god beheld the maiden, he desired to draw near to her. Seeing that she was pleased at the sight of wild flowers, the god thought, “By flowers shall I keep her here for a long time.”

Then the god took the heavenly blossoms from the garland that he wore, and scattered them upon the hills and plains. Straightaway, those heavenly flowers spread out upon the earth, covering it in colours brighter than any flowers of this world. The green of the highland forest became a garden of the gods.

When the maiden came to gather wood, she saw the countless flowers, and her heart was filled with wonder. She forgot her household tasks and wandered long in the garden of the gods. 

Then the god took the form of a young man, fair to see, and he drew near to her. He spoke kindly, and she was pleased. At parting, he said, “I will return on the morrow. In this garden, we shall meet again.” 

But one day among the gods is twelve years on earth. Thus, though the maiden waited through days and through months, the god did not appear. At length she thought, “That day in the heavenly garden was but a dream,” and she gave it no more heed.

Yet the god was true to his word. On the morrow of the gods, after twelve earthly years, he came again to the highlands. The garden of the gods sprang forth upon the hills and the plains, in colours and in beauty without measure.

To this day, every twelfth year, the hills are clothed in blossoms, and the divine garden reappears on earth. There the young god waits, ever hopeful, for his earthly love.

Thus it is said: the garden of the gods still appears and vanishes, not to be possessed by human nor deity. To desire beauty is human, even divine. But to seek to possess it is folly.

Folk tales are often dismissed as stories unworthy of documentation. They rarely entered libraries until anthropologists, scholars, and revered intellectuals like Carl Jung began to expose their depth as tales springing from universal symbols common to humankind and the reservoirs of our collective unconscious. This story, The Garden of the Gods, not only draws from that shared well of wisdom, but it also entwines with a vivid natural phenomenon that takes place with uncanny resemblance to the folk tale. 

This happens in Sri Lanka’s world heritage site, Horton Plains, in the central highlands, where the tale is said to originate. Here, every twelve years, Strobilanthes species erupt in a synchronized mass flowering that transforms the highlands into a spectacle still described by locals as ‘the garden of the gods.’ As many as 33 Strobilanthes species take part, with at least 30 endemic, some critically endangered.

Strobilanthes kunthiana is one of the endangered species that takes part in the synchronized flowering. The mass flowering gives the Strobilanthes species a better chance at pollinating and surviving predators.

Folk tales usually spring up as unremarkably as wildflowers and disappear without getting recorded. They were transmitted by grandparents charged with containing restless children through stories, so that afternoons in households could remain sane. Sometimes those children retold the tales when they grew older, but most slipped quietly out of memory, especially as oral traditions changed. Rarely were they written down, unless an anthropologist or occasional story-keeper stumbled upon one too remarkable to let vanish; too wondrous to be forgotten.

This folk tale sparked lifelong wonder in those who first heard the story as children, only to later see it come true across the Horton Plains: myth confirmed by nature, wonder given form. For those alive when botanists explained the twelve-year flowering cycle of Strobilanthes in the 20th century, the awe deepened further with science and story converging. The tale will stir still more wonder for future generations who may never see all 33 species bloom again across Sri Lanka’s highlands, as many now hover on the edge of extinction.

Stories are timeless vessels of wonder. They are not escapes from reality but frames through which reality reveals itself. The Garden of the Gods is one such frame. It's a folk tale that carries—through myth, ecology, loss, and longing—the truth that beauty cannot be possessed. This is how stories distill truth into forms that are more accessible, memorable, and enduring. 

When work is worship

A recipe for contentment revealed through an unintentional master

Growing up, the adult attitude toward work that surrounded me was that it was a tedious penalty for being financially able. Work was simply an exchange: money for energy. Unless you had a trust fund, it was a universal rule; you worked if you wanted to pay bills. No escape. I absorbed that culture and spent my early twenties preparing for careers that promised a nice paycheck at the end of the month, regardless of how I felt about the work itself. And I got one. It seemed simple enough until I encountered a simpler exchange that not only made life more bearable but also rendered it meaningful.

It is when work and worship are in the same stream. Image: Dan Arndt, 2018, Ambalangoda mask maker

My first glimpse into how work and worship could be the same stream came through a master mask maker in Ambalangoda, Sri Lanka. What struck me first was how disgruntled he seemed to have customers. We had interrupted his work, which he clearly loved to immerse in. There seemed to be something greater in his craft than the prospect of money. When I asked why he chose to become a mask maker, he simply said he had taken to it after watching his uncle carve masks; the act called to him. There was no grand scheme or career strategy. It was pure interest. My questions about how he learned the craft or shaped his process seemed to puzzle him. “You just do it, there is nothing else to it,” he said.

The master was not a financially affluent man. He earned what he could from visitors buying masks, occasional commissions, and the odd state-sponsored grant or award. His workshop was simple, his clothes even simpler. He wasn’t working on a major commission, but he was carving another spectacular mask to exhibit at Shilpa, the state craft exhibition, the following year. Compared to Colombo’s ‘successful’ artists, he seemed uninterested in visibility, interviews, or recognition. What he carried instead was an air of rare contentment. He had neither great luxury nor widespread fame. Even I, writing about him some years later, can’t remember his name. But what does that matter?

Because I remember how the master was deeply immersed in his work. Its reception was of no great consequence to him. Its legacy was irrelevant. His masks were an act of devotion to the relationship he had with his surroundings, perhaps even with his materials. They arose from his curiosity towards an act and his compulsion to converse with it, on terms that were strictly his own. I couldn’t imagine a higher form of creative contentment. For him, work itself was worship.

The master was not interested in teaching me. But he did, nevertheless. He showed me that the gap we assume between work and worship is not natural. The two can be the same. And lives lived in that unity, I believe with good reason, are blessed with a rare sense of contentment.

Worship isn’t only in temples, churches, or mosques; it’s in the act of being deeply there for something. Worship is not a place, but a quality of presence. Worship isn’t in ritual alone, but in how we show up to the world. When someone is fully present in their task—whether sweeping a floor, weaving, coding, or painting—there is reverence in that presence.

I don’t know what became of the master mask maker. Perhaps he still shapes wood into faces with stories. Perhaps he died content in the act of doing so. Either way, he left me with an insight that shifted my own course. I stopped trying to fit into careers that looked good on paper and instead turned to the messy path of becoming a commercial creator to fund my personal creativity. When my son asks me what he should become when he grows up, I tell him to find where he naturally loses himself; to look for acts that draw him with curiosity, to immerse himself; to find worship in life.

Now, I know for certain that work is best as a form of worship. And more often than we realize, worship is the better exchange with the world; one that sustains meaning and pays the bills.

Why the typo changed from a public embarrassment to an endearing sign of being human

A personal story from PW co-creator, Shamalee

The other week, when we were wrapping up an intense period leading up to travel overseas, I couldn't proofread a story that my partner published for our studio newsletter, and it went out with a grammatical error. Now, this was not the first time our studio has made a little mistake, but seeing it on my screen still brought up a bad taste at the back of my throat. Unlike all the previous times, when I would torture myself and question my credibility as a writer, the bad taste subsided almost immediately, because the calm voice in my head said, “Well, it leaves no doubt that this newsletter is written by humans and not AI.”

This got me thinking about how creators will most likely start seeing errors or other slips in perfection more as a hallmark of the humanness in their work, and less as embarrassing things to camouflage. It’s not just when it comes to mistakes; it’s interesting to consider how AI—or the perception of it—will influence creativity around the idea of ‘perfection.’

Just a few weeks ago, I read how the em dash—probably my favourite punctuation mark, because I like to introduce offshoots of ideas into sentences—is starting to get the reputation as a sign of AI writing. And it’s not entirely unfounded; ChatGPT seems to have a habitual devotion to the em dash, giving unnecessary significance to pauses and breaks in common sentences. Because of this, I found myself consciously holding back on the em dash, forcing myself not to bring my layered thoughts into sentences. Soon enough, I realized that I was compromising my mind’s mechanism just to distance my work from what’s perceived as a sign of AI-generated creativity. As much as we are used to prototyping and shaping AI, it will also undoubtedly shape us—the way we create, and our distinction of what makes our creativity ‘human.’

I recently visited my old university at the invitation to critique an undergraduate project on designing stories for Sri Lankan cities in predominantly visual aspects, with some written language components. Here, I became highly aware of how I judge the value of creative work against what I consider to be genuine human creative output versus AI-generated. In 70% of the work presented, the written components of the story, such as slogans and promotional texts, reeked of ChatGPT. And I’m not talking about sentence structure or an overuse of the em dash. Although I couldn’t put a finger on what was so distinctly ChatGPT about those works at the time, now I can. It’s best explained as “saying a lot without saying anything”: words that are strung together to create a sense of (subjective) beauty, but utterly hollow of lived experience and a viewpoint. They are not directional. Words that have logical and even aesthetic coherence, but don’t communicate a point of view in an idea; that have the micro-connections, and the many emotional and sensory associations that we humans make with things in our mind and things we perceive in the outer world. They lacked the many dimensions that seep into the writing of a human who has genuinely experienced the subject. For those students, I didn’t think mediocre writing posed a great threat, particularly because their course was more focused on the visual elements of storytelling. However, I was concerned that they were missing out on the accidental wonder of creativity by using ChatGPT for creative writing.

An idea is not limited to one form of expression; the same idea has many forms, such as visual, linguistic, sonic, etc. When you approach an idea from many directions, your view of it becomes richer and more distinct. As a design student many years ago, I discovered the joy of writing simply through attempts to describe ideas as best as possible. Although my projects were not being marked for writing per se, my attempt to use language to articulate an idea gave me a different hold on it—something more concrete and definitive that visuals didn’t deliver. Ultimately, it led me to a career focusing more on writing designed for commercial outcomes. But I wondered if the students who used ChatGPT for their project writing were missing out on the chance to get a different grip on their idea—or even a breakthrough into an entirely different career path in creativity. I don’t know; too soon to tell. Who am I to judge? Each to their own life and times, isn’t it?

I’m not against AI; in fact, I think it has the potential to rid us of meaningless or tedious tasks. I use a trained version of ChatGPT to draft emails, formal letters to the city council, project proposals, notes to the lawyer, follow-ups, lists… things that I don’t care to excel at. But when it comes to creative writing, AI is more of a technical assistant than a substitute: to cross-check whether a new story contradicts an old one in a series; to proofread and grammar-check drafts. I look forward to the day when AI can do everything I don’t want to do: filing taxes, laundry, groceries, bookkeeping, managing employees—even if it’s at the cost of another machine having an enormous influence on my life. Anything to escape doing chores so I can read and write more, really.

Until then, I just have to watch how the world evolves, understand our parts in shaping it, and hold on to what I like about being human a little closer.