I like to sleep.
Give me some sunlight; a small pool like a cat or dog would find indoors
on a hazy, cold winter’s day with the sun creeping into the room through the
cold glass of a frosted window. Give me
some sunlight; in a garden, on a station platform, anywhere in February in
India with a sun that penetrates the bones and thaws out the damp cold of an
English winter so that I take off my open sandals and let the soles of my feet
touch the soul of the earth: thawing out the cold reserve of an Englishman. Eyes close and breathing deepens by a Grecian
sea and the clarity of the water washes through the mind with soft movement
over the gentle stones. Eyes close and
breathing deepens with the breeze in the trees and the birds calling and the
beguiling sound of a bird of prey wheeling on the warm currents of the summer
air over the fields near the cottage we are calling home for the time
being. Maybe I can die like this – eyes
close, breathing deepens and then it is finished, only the sunlight and life. But we do not choose our birth and with great difficulty may we choose our death.
To be connected to nature, in fact to acknowledge
that we are inextricably part of nature, is to be alive. Watch and listen and learn. Watch the people walking in the city moving
from their certainty and their despair.
Watch the bees that buzz and hum around the clover in the grass, and
listen to them. Learn from the leaf that
dances in the wind. But we don’t…. Instead we like to kill. To kill the animal whose bloodied flesh we
burn and eat with perverted sensory satisfaction; to kill the animal in the name of sport so that we can
enjoy a sense of fulfilment; and to kill each other to further our greed, our
hatred and to seek some hiding place from our fear. Steadily all this killing seeps into our
consciousness and we see it as a normal way of living in our insane world.
I like to sleep in nature. Not in some box rising halfway up to the sky
or dug deep into the ground. There are
creatures out at night searching and snuffling, surviving and seeking; they are
nearby and I can hear them. There are
people out in the towns at night vomiting, shouting, urinating and stumbling, I
have heard them nearby and I don’t sleep well.
To educate the spirit is to learn in nature, with nature and from nature. There has been much written recently about children and their disconnection from nature; not just children, but adults as well, and apparently there is research that has shown the beneficial effect that even a walk in the park can have on the psychological well-being of the individual. Educators in India in the 20th Century such as Tagore and Krishnamurti had the love of nature in their very being and this comes through in their writing, transcriptions of their talks and the legacy of the schools they have founded. Now we have Forest Schools, Rewilding projects, and many other calls for reconnection, but there still dominates a sense that humanity is apart from nature, not a part of the natural world. If humanity remains separated from nature then we are lost.
I have begun work on exploring learning, education, nature and the human mind. There is in this an interesting paradox, for to be connected to nature means that the individual goes beyond her or himself, and this connection is beyond the limitation of words. So how can this exploration be expressed?
I have begun work on exploring learning, education, nature and the human mind. There is in this an interesting paradox, for to be connected to nature means that the individual goes beyond her or himself, and this connection is beyond the limitation of words. So how can this exploration be expressed?
