Words, words, words...I started reading and I started sharing, and she started listening and she started leaning in. As I read word upon word, I felt the intensity build and emotions swell. She felt it too.
And we were together in this rise.
We were reading a transcription of Virginia Woolf’s meditation on words…words, that have their own life, that live in our minds, like living entities, whose common purpose is to reach the truth, as close to the truth as possible…who have their own lives and wills and sometimes when, after we can own them, if we let them be, emerge from within us, find each other to create the most beautiful, most truthful image they can!
But this is not about words, nor the power of words. It could be, and probably should be, but it is not.
It is about that experience, that shared experience that lifted us. Without saying much directly to each other or expressing our emotions, we were connected… we were not connected with each other also, but something beyond that held us both in suspension in that shared momen. And I am not quite sure what that was…
Was it admiration? Was it wonder?
I saw her eyes moisten and I felt my voice balmy and did her eyes moisten my voice or did my voice moisten her eyes? We cannot be sure.
But, whatever it was, it was beautiful and I think that is the beauty in whatever is beautiful to the human spirit, that it goes beyond itself and it can also go beyond you and me and it holds us both in shared experience which we can reach out to but not fully reach.
And if we can somehow hold that beauty in front of children, it would lift them and bind them and connect them in some manner with the universal human experience and though we found it in words, the amazing thing is that it can be found anywhere - in numbers, in colours, in codes, in the mind, on the feet.
And when we ‘teach’, merely ‘teach’, we deconstruct and demystify and de-beautify and then we reduce the beauty of whatever it is that we touch and make it functional, merely functional.
Well, the fortunate thing is that it functions. But the unfortunate thing is that then, it only functions.
Contributed by Poorva Agarwal, Curriculum Designer and Learning Facilitator at Sparkling Mindz Global School.
And we were together in this rise.
We were reading a transcription of Virginia Woolf’s meditation on words…words, that have their own life, that live in our minds, like living entities, whose common purpose is to reach the truth, as close to the truth as possible…who have their own lives and wills and sometimes when, after we can own them, if we let them be, emerge from within us, find each other to create the most beautiful, most truthful image they can!
But this is not about words, nor the power of words. It could be, and probably should be, but it is not.
It is about that experience, that shared experience that lifted us. Without saying much directly to each other or expressing our emotions, we were connected… we were not connected with each other also, but something beyond that held us both in suspension in that shared momen. And I am not quite sure what that was…
Was it admiration? Was it wonder?
I saw her eyes moisten and I felt my voice balmy and did her eyes moisten my voice or did my voice moisten her eyes? We cannot be sure.
But, whatever it was, it was beautiful and I think that is the beauty in whatever is beautiful to the human spirit, that it goes beyond itself and it can also go beyond you and me and it holds us both in shared experience which we can reach out to but not fully reach.
And if we can somehow hold that beauty in front of children, it would lift them and bind them and connect them in some manner with the universal human experience and though we found it in words, the amazing thing is that it can be found anywhere - in numbers, in colours, in codes, in the mind, on the feet.
And when we ‘teach’, merely ‘teach’, we deconstruct and demystify and de-beautify and then we reduce the beauty of whatever it is that we touch and make it functional, merely functional.
Well, the fortunate thing is that it functions. But the unfortunate thing is that then, it only functions.
Contributed by Poorva Agarwal, Curriculum Designer and Learning Facilitator at Sparkling Mindz Global School.
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