Our Living Monuments

I do not usually wake up in the morning thinking about heritage conservation.

On a recent morning, however, I was doom-scrolling through Instagram, and feeling bad about it, when I happened across an old post about the Great Buddhas of Bamiyan. Until that moment, I had never heard of them. Within minutes I was tumbling down a Google rabbit hole, reading about two monumental (over 150 foot tall) Buddha statues carved into the cliffs of central Afghanistan nearly fifteen hundred (1500) years ago. I then watched archival footage of their destruction in 2001 and found myself staring at two enormous empty niches where they had once stood.

What does it say about me that I was not surprised by the senseless act? Horrified yes. Not surprised though. I was, however, surprised by the intensity of my emotional response. Why did I feel such a profound sense of loss for monuments I had never seen, in a country I have never visited, dedicated to a religion that is not my own? Those Buddhas had nothing to do with me. And yet… they did. I was moved and saddened because they were a record of human achievement and cooperation. And now they were lost.

These two Buddhas (one larger than the other) represented an extraordinary moment when a civilization decided that an idea, a belief, a story, was worth carving into the landscape itself. The two had survived kingdoms, invasions, changing religions and the passing of fifteen centuries. Then, in a matter of weeks, they were reduced to rubble. As a branding exercise. For the Taliban.

The world mourned.

Because something irreplaceable had disappeared from humanity's shared inheritance. That thought stayed with me for days, and then, quite unexpectedly, it brought me right back to Kingston.

Live Lignum Vitae trees are protected. Dead ones are not.

There is a corner in Kingston, in the Golden Triangle area, that I have driven past for years. For most of my life it was the site of an elegant old Georgian house with a large yard shaded by two magnificent Lignum Vitae trees, with perfectly umbrella-shaped canopies of deep purple shade. One of them was something truly special: a rare, white Lignum Vitae. Both had probably stood there for centuries.

Every year, during butterfly season, those trees would transform into a locus of pure magic. Clouds of Lignum Vitae butterflies would settle into their expansive canopies until the leaves would disappear beneath a living blanket of pale, yellow wings. It was one of those small moments of beauty that asks only that you notice it. No ticket. No admission fee. No plaque. No announcement. Just a reminder that beauty can erupt in the middle of an ordinary drive through the city.

Then the property went up for sale.

Oh Lord! The moment I saw the sign, I had a sinking feeling in my belly-bottom. The two trees occupied the front corner of the lot. Exactly where a developer would most likely want a gateway or a parking lot.

Months later I drove past again. This time I was in a snarl of unmoving traffic. The house was gone. Both trees were still standing. But the white one was a dense brown skeleton of twigs, branches and trunk. Dead. The other looked like it was heading in the same direction.

Looking at them as I sat in traffic for 3 light changes without moving a single inch, I found myself wondering whether the tree had simply died... or whether someone had made sure it did. I don't know. What I do know is that, when I first saw the property listed for sale, I feared those trees wouldn't survive the development. Seeing one of them standing there, lifeless my fear was justified: It is illegal to wantonly cut down a Lignum Vitae as they are protected. But if it’s dead… different story.

My heart hurt. I wanted to cry. I actually felt tears welling as I finally moved 3 feet forward. Because it was my special tree; because it felt like one more quiet disappearance. One more piece of Jamaica becoming slightly less. One more likkle piece to live on only in my fragile memory.

Perhaps this is why I care so much about scent. I understood instinctively that smell is the fastest shortcut to memory. And I knew this long before I ever thought of adding scented candles to my product line. The smell of Chanel No.5 and Dunhill cigarettes. The smell of salt drying on skin. The tart, musky tang of ripe sea grapes, crushed between your fingers. Hot driftwood. The smell of rain in the air before it falls. These things don't just remind us of places. They are the places. Lose enough of them and eventually you begin to lose the place itself.

I grew up at a house called Mandalay near the fishing village of Port Henderson. Back then, my road was a marl track on a narrow ribbon of land between the Kingston harbour and the swampy wetlands of Dawkins Pond. A salty, black sand place that I roamed freely, barefoot. The sea stretched on one side to Port Royal in the hazy distance, the swamp exhaled pensively on the other. And between them, our family home. This was the first place that taught me what my Jamaica smelled like.

Salt carried on the breeze. Warm earth after rain. Mangrove mud at low tide. Seaweed drying in the afternoon sun. The sweet stink of dead starfish drying out on bleached coral mixed with the aroma of thyme and rosemary on a warm breeze. These fragrances became the early foundations of my memory.

Today, that coastline is completely changed. Much of it has been buried beneath marl, concrete and piecemeal development. The little fishing village I knew has slowly become a landscape of truck yards, dumping, tall walls and seedy spaces that seem to exist completely outside Kingston's planning authority. The address is still there but the place exists only in my memory. That is why I named the first of SIIM's signature candles Mandalay. It was an attempt to preserve a place and a feeling that no longer exists in quite the same way.

When we hear the word monument, most of us imagine statues.

Churches. Castles. Government buildings. Stuff like that… But monuments aren't only made of stone and concrete and steel. They are made of memory. A centuries-old Lignum Vitae is a monument. A reef is a monument. A beach that generations of Jamaicans have walked is a monument. A popular fishing village is a monument. A silk cotton tree that has watched children become grandparents is a monument.

Our landscape carries our history every bit as much as our buildings do. Perhaps even more.

The irony is that living monuments rarely receive the reverence we reserve for carved ones. We instinctively understand why someone would mourn the destruction of Notre-Dame or the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Yet we think very little of removing a mature tree that has anchored a neighborhood for longer than anyone living can remember.

We see land. We calculate square footage. We imagine parking. We neglect to think about what was already there.

Jamaicans often speak proudly about ours being a naturally beautiful country. We market our beaches, our waterfalls, our Blue Mountains, our tropical forests, and our unique plants and animals. But our country’s beauty is not just a tourism product. It is part of our cultural inheritance. Every mature tree we remove without a thought; every coastline we privatize; every river we pollute; every hillside we strip bare; every mangrove we fill… We reduce the inheritance we leave behind.

Future generations cannot inherit landscapes we chose not to protect.

It is possible that for Jamaica, our most important monuments are not made of stone at all. Perhaps they are sensory. The smell of a coastline. The cool shade beneath a familiar tree. The sound of waves breaking against a beach you knew as a child. The sea of yellow butterflies that arrive every year without fail. These are the landmarks by which we navigate our own lives. Lose enough of them, and you don't just lose a landscape… you lose a part of yourself.

Some things cannot be recreated.

The Buddhas of Bamiyan taught me something I wasn't expecting on a Thursday morning.

Every generation decides what is worth carrying into the future. Some civilizations carved their beliefs into mountains. Others built cathedrals. Others planted gardens that outlived kings.

What will ours leave behind?

Will our grandchildren inherit cities where every tree that stood in the way of development silently disappeared? Will they know what a mature Lignum Vitae looked like in butterfly season? Will they ever stand in the cool shade of a tree that began growing before Jamaica was even a country? Will they know what a sleepy fishing village on the fringe of the city smelled like before the marl, the concrete and the oily truck yards?

Or will they know these things only through photographs and stories… in the same way I know the Buddhas of Bamiyan?

The empty niches in Afghanistan are a reminder that destruction is permanent, and memory is fragile. We cannot rebuild fifteen centuries of history once they are gone. Neither can we replace a centuries-old tree by planting a blasted Christmas Palm and pretending the loss has been balanced.

Some things cannot be recreated. They can only be protected while they still exist.

So what did the Buddhas teach me?

Did they teach that millennia-old monuments made of stone can be destroyed for shallow gains? No. World wars have taught me that. Instead, I’ve learned that every society reveals what it truly values by the things it refuses to lose.

What is that for Jamaica?