As a child of the 80s and 90s, life was good. Despite growing up in the city, my childhood was not severed from the natural world. Apart from the numerous parks, gardens, and playgrounds we children had to ourselves, I also had the luxury of my vacations in Kerala. I am surprised by how little I recall of events in the last few years, while some of the memories of my childhood are as clear as daylight. I even remember how slowly time passed in my mother's ancestral house in Kerala. The nights were long, electricity was just a dim-lit room with the moths arranging themselves on the ceiling around the bulb. There was not much that we could do, and there was no television to watch. So we kids would find our own ways to pass time. I remember the smell of hay and the attic where firewood was stacked. I remember the pretty wild flowers that grew everywhere, some purple and some yellow, some with round bulbs and others with fragile petals. I remember the dull thud of coconuts falling from the tree. In the city, my memories of childhood are of open spaces filled with the sounds of play and laughter; of interesting indigenous characters with an abundance of affection and native wisdom; and of thousands and thousands of books that presented to our little minds the enticing worlds beyond our own. As a child, I had nature, books and people to absorb. The world of my childhood faded away slowly. The people from my childhood left; some changed. Places changed. The culture changed. Even as men turned into beasts, nature remained.
I recently picked up Heidi to reminisce impressions from my childhood. When Heidi accompanies Peter and the goats to the pastures high up in the mountains, she finds herself awed by the experience of the natural world. The glorious sunset leaves behind a lasting impression on her young mind. Only the intuitive wisdom of a child can access the invisible communication that exists between the elements of our world. As the sun sets, it appears to have set everything ablaze. Every rock, every blade of grass, every flower, is brought under the sun's spell. For a few moments, they have all borrowed the character of the sun, and have lost their distinctiveness. The sunset becomes a unifying force, and the earth speaks the language of the sun. Heidi is too young to verbalize the phenomenon she has just witnessed, but her native wisdom allows her to access the miracles of the universe and to form impressions of these. Her native wisdom allows her to discern what is original and profound. Heidi is sad when the spell ends, and the colors of the sunset give way to darkness. She voices her concern to Peter who reassures her by declaring that it will be the same the next evening. Heidi is relieved to learn that this phenomenon repeats itself day after day.
Heidi voiced the concern that we all have. None of us really like change. There are things we wish would never change. Deep inside, we want everything to be the same. We never want to grow old, we never want to be parted from our homes and our near and dear ones, we never want to be separated from the familiarity of all that was once home. Deep inside, we always want to belong. We learn the hard way that we have to let go of many things we cherished and identified with. Eventually, we only belong with the impressions that exist within us. The impressions that can never be erased, simply because they touched us so deep at a time when we could devour our world without any filters.
So what remains? Nature remains. Knowledge remains. Even when everything else has faded away, there is nature that comforts, counsels, and heals. Nature that recreates the experiences of our childhood. Nature that allows us to go back to our instinctive nature. There is also knowledge that allows us to be eternally youthful, and never lose the qualities of our childhood- our inquisitiveness, our fearlessness, our desire to know, our ability to lose ourselves to experiences, and our ability to be touched.
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