To Nature with Love and Gratitude
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
Life recalls literature for everyone – and especially for one
is who is a student or an aficionado of literature. Even a routine morning walk
when the world is relatively calm, un-battered by the fretful fever and stir of
the day, helps him/her to recall many a gem of pure literature stored in the
unfathomed caves of the mind. The above lines surged through me when I saw a
tiny toddler taking its baby strides along the garden path in his papa’s
company. He had just started walking, with his tiny fingers twined round the big
hands of his father. The rich colours of
garden flowers attracted him and his ecstatic delight seeing the violets and
the roses, the lilies and the magnolias was infectious. It hardly mattered to
him what was what as he randomly flitted from plant to plant. Spring or summer,
autumn or winter-nature seemed to beckon him saying, ‘Come, here’s God’s
plenty’.
At 70+, I go for walks-and like me many septuagenarians and
octogenarians make it a routine to go for a walk. Unlike the child who insists
on being taken out every morning, we are reluctant walkers compelled to walk to
beat the old age related ailments. But we do not have those moments of joy that
we must have also had when we were like the children we see in the park today.
I recalled once more Wordsworth’s lament “Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where
is it now, the glory and the dream?”
Every season new
children come to the garden- not the same ones. As the tiny toddler grows out of his childhood, other attractions
come and heloses interest in the walk around the garden path. He develops new
routine as his hours of sleep are dictated by events and happenings of the day.
He goes to bed late and wakes up late. The parents fondly indulge in the boy’s
new found luxury of sleeping into the late hours of the morning and gradually
he loses all his love for the garden and the visual riches it offers. In some
way adults are responsible for luring the child from its instinctive love for
Nature to other worldly attractions. By the
time he attends school as a boy, environment and Nature become remote concepts
in the book, far removed from the sensual delight he had earlier experienced.
Preserving and fostering Nature are paternalistic ideas drilled into him without
providing him the experience to savour Nature as he did as a child.
It
will be a good idea if we restore to the growing child its earlier spontaneous
response to the glory that is Nature. I
would advocate a return to Gurukul style of education that lays emphasis on
personal discipline. Gurukul does not
mean just face to face teaching by a Guru, but it embodies discipline born out
of respect for the Guru. To rise up early, to go outdoors for physical
exercise, to be let out in the garden to enjoy its beauty, to sing and dance in
the early balmy weather before the sun comes blazing, to feel the early morning
breeze on the face and experience the tingling sensation of dew drops falling
on the body- all these constitute an essential part of happy childhood
experience. The psychological feeling of unremembered pleasure that Nature
swings for him in these early years will fill him with gratitude and love for
Nature. The discipline of having a head
start early in the morning enhances his power of self control and self
regulation that results in mental improvement and physical fitness. We are all
a part of the material world subscribing to the Laws of Nature. All created
beings in this world are diurnal beings in consonance with Nature’s cyclical
orbit through day and night. Waking and sleeping follow the pattern set by
Nature through sunrise and sunset. Let us extend our relationship with Nature
all through life without waiting for old age to compel us to step on the grass.
Let not the years between childhood and old age be years lost in inertia and
blind to the aesthetics of Nature. This is what Swami Vivekananda said: ‘Arise,
awake , walk and stop not till the goal is reached’ .
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