Tear down the walls!
Deconstruct the language! Wash
away the thinking! Exams are killing the
young, sucking out their souls and mangling their senses until they are completely absorbed with their ‘future’ and the present has been sacrificed at the altar
of arbitrary qualifications and random grades.
Joining the armies of the empty and the ranks of the frightened, your
boys and girls stare from their lifeless eyes like fish on a slab, and are
imprisoned in a world of make-believe.
Fairy-tale princesses glide by whilst their muscled young men loll
contentedly like tom-cats ready to prowl out into the night of stark cold
lights and drunken screams whilst the grass grows quietly through the relics of
their dreams, leaving them like rusted limousines of lies.
Can you live in uncertainty? Can you walk through a wood, over a moor, by
the sea, by the river, along the trail of a mountain, through the dry, dusty
desert, and the lush green valley, and not know where you are going?
What if there was a place in the world which said:
you can do exams, but exams are not on the curriculum? How can your child keep all her options
open? How can he keep up the pace of
this global race, and how can she fulfill her potential… be happy?
He was really quite a small man, white hair swept
defiantly over a shining nut brown dome of intelligence. His eyes had the quality of depth and
fullness that is not uncommon among many South Indians and the voice that
seemed to join the wind still had that Asiatic feel. He sat straight-backed, trembling hands
gripping a white handkerchief…. A man
may make statements, a man may ask questions, a man may challenge; but if all
those that listen do is to stare in awe, wonder and reverence, then that it
would have been better if that man had never lived.
What if there was a place in the world that was
about learning about life; not just someone’s idea about life? What if I, a man whose thinning white hair
and stiffening joints, could engage with the vigour of youth, absorb the tears
of young eyes, the smiles of laughing faces and listen to the passing of life
in the understanding of an exploration which would not be fettered by fear and
expectations, but revel in an ocean of possibilities. Look at the hands of the maker, the planter,
the painter and the poet; their fingers are at work, their bright eyes open;
and their minds touching a stillness that has no possessor, no separation.
What if there was a place in the world where there
was a sense of discovering together? She
would always touch the giant redwood when we passed; her long golden hair
shrouding her face as she pressed against the soft trunk and her hands
flattened as if gently communing through their touch. She would say that it was like returning to
an old friend, no need to explain the absence, just taking up where they left
off. The tree stands in a grove and is
flanked by others that reach up to an extraordinary height; today it is dark
with the rain and the branches drip amid the thickening gloom…its stillness reaches
into her, an unbroken connection of wood, water, flesh, bone, blood and earth.
The seed is growing; the flowering may take a while
in the presence of the dead weight of inertia and brittle certainty. Courage is needed at every cautious, but
steady step. Nonetheless, the plight of
the young cannot be left to their first faltering, clamorous demands, neither
with the smooth, unctuous piety of those that exploit in the illusory game of
success and failure. It has to be with
the rough-hewn, mistake-ridden, half-blinded adventurers who have seen a light
shining dimly in the distance, and have some understanding that it is learning,
a learning that cannot be measured.
