Familiarity often veils our perception of things, events and beings that are mysterious and wonderful.
How wonderful are stars that twinkle in the sky and delight children who are not yet familiar with the world? And what about the play of colours! We may paint hundreds of paintings with colours but can we ever reproduce a real and natural colour! And what about the glow of the colour?
The rainbow of colours still looks marvellous to us because it is not everyday that we see the rainbow. And look at flowers – flowers that are fresh and wet with dew drops. How delightfully are our hearts captured by them as we pick them, touch them with tender fingers that are tuned to the freshness and tenderness of the flowers.
Such was my experience one morning when, in a garden, I beheld a bunch of beautiful fully blossomed water lilies floating steadily in the water without being touched by the wetness of the water.
There, I realized the true purity that is beautiful but unattached. What a message those water lilies were conveying to the depths of my soul! Is it not said that an ideal personality should bloom like a lotus which is above all likes and dislikes and remains untarnished even when floods of water are poured over it! Sthitapragnya, one whose intelligence is settled, has rightly been compared to the water lilies.
Water lilies, in our Indian tradition, symbolises divine consciousness. To be near a water lily is to be in the vicinity of God, and we feel transported in adoration of the highest and the best.
And that’s when this question popped in my mind – can we provide this experience to the children? And what shall we do for that purpose? It is not a question only of flowers and water lily. It is a question of everything in the world. It is our familiarity with the world that veils for us the wonder of everything. That is why there is a deep prayer to make our eyes so sublime and fresh that whenever we look at anything in the world we feel like Wordsworth – the daffodils continue to refresh our minds long after we have seen them. He was, perhaps, one great poet in the world whose love for nature was so intense that even to read his poems makes us partake into his experience as nature vibrating the spirit.
This brings us to the subject of poetry. What is poetry? If not an intense expression of the freshness of emotions, colours, sights, perceptions and events that can transport us into the world of unfamiliarity and the world of wonder. Such is the value of education on poetry. As Shri Aurobindo has said, “Poetry, Music and Art are a complete education of the soul.”
Unfortunately, in our present age, we do not allow our children to have leisure to find company in nature, and we overcoat their minds and hearts with grossness that may look glittering but has no gold in it. We need to change our entire attitude towards education.
What a delight it was that day when I had this contact with water lilies who had in their heart an inexpressible Smile. The flame of this smile lit up my entire being. This led me straight to the children seated in the near ‘prison homes’ of schools, deeply in need of that Smile.
Let us set the class ablaze with this Smile. Let us bring freshness in education, leisure in education and time to look and enjoy so that the objects of our perception bring to us their freshness and enliven the deepest recesses of our hearts.
