"What is life when you are walking in the garden?" is what a teacher from Sunbeam School, Balia, and I were talking about in our recent Wisdom Mandli session on Saturday, when she used the word 'sukoon' in her response. When some cards kept appearing and disappearing on the screen, with questions that are felt but mostly not asked of each other in everyday conversation, I was asking myself: What interests me in the world now? What am I curious to find out- the chaos, the harmony and the functioning of everything around me.
Sometimes, there is an assumption that learning sessions are online, and they seem slightly disorienting until you attend them with the intention of meeting and hearing the voices of educators and people sharing their conundrums in life and school. Take what speaks to you, and don't beat yourself up for everything that's beyond your head.
Wisdom Mandli was a session that opened my curiosity about the mundane around me! I was aware of what I feel in the kitchen, in the garden, or under the stars (they are hardly visible now), but can I speak about just that to a fellow teacher? We live in different realities, but these are such universal feelings and experiences. We were just coming to a point in the discussion where we were brainstorming how we could bring wisdom to our children and still be able to teach our curriculum when it struck me- Isn't talking about it already a large part of why we would want our children to learn in the first place? We are surrounded by ecology and nature all the time, but we sometimes just bypass it and do not pause to wonder. These sessions with Wisdom Mandli by project Fuel are my gateway for this month to something larger than me, me, me. I'd like my students to tell me how they feel when they walk barefoot on the ground. I am curious about their observations. It is a peek into their inner landscapes, and these questions seem like a torch to go with.
