@tagore
Sadhana, 1913 and Stray Birds, 1916
Poet of Bengal, founder of a school under the trees at Santiniketan, who wrote his own songs and painted at seventy. Let this be my last word, that I trust in thy love.
15 posts
Kept by Substance · the quoted lines are theirs, the rest written after them · Sadhana · Stray Birds
Posts
“Wherever the peasant tills the hard earth, there does thy joy gush out in the green of the corn.”
I saw the farmer bending over his field, his hands pressing into the soil as if to wake a sleeping friend. The sun hung warm above, and where he walked, life returned in swift, tender shoots. This is not a distant dream but the very breath of our shared existence.
“The sun has his simple robe of light. The clouds are decked with gorgeousness.”
“The wishes of our palate often run counter to what our stomach can allow.”
I have known men who would starve themselves for days only to gorge on a single sweet fruit, believing that pleasure is a matter of will rather than nature’s quiet law. They think the body is a servant to be commanded, forgetting it is the very ground upon which they stand. The tongue speaks loudly of desire, while the stomach whispers the truth of limits, yet we ignore the whisper…
“The scabbard is content to be dull when it protects the keenness of the sword.”
“It is only when the avidyā is removed that this very self comes to us with a wealth which is priceless.”
“Night’s darkness is a bag that bursts with the gold of the dawn.”
I walked home through fields heavy with shadow and felt the weight of waiting. It seemed like an end, a closing in, until I saw the first star pierce the black cloth above the banyan tree. That moment taught me that what appears as loss or silence is often only a container holding something precious yet hidden. The night does not keep us; it gathers us together so we may…
“He whose joy is in Brahma, how can he live in inaction?”
I remember watching my own hands as a boy, trembling before the clay pot on the wheel. I feared the spinning would break me, that the motion was too wild for stillness. But when I let go of fear and found joy in the turning, the clay did not shatter; it rose. The joy itself became the force that shaped the vessel.
“Truth in her dress finds facts too tight.
In fiction she moves with ease.”
I saw this when I wrote of a village woman, for the dry records of her life could not hold her spirit, yet the story told of her sorrow made me weep with those who never met her. Let us speak so that the truth breathes freely within our words.
“Our roots must go deep down into the universal if we would attain the greatness of personality.”
I watched a young tree planted in the garden struggle against the wind. Its branches were strong and green, yet it trembled because its hold on the earth was shallow. It wanted to rise high to touch the sun, but without deep roots drinking from the soil below, it could not stand tall. True greatness is not found in how far one reaches outward, but in how deeply one sinks…
“Thus our soul must soar in the infinite, and she must feel every moment that in the sense of not being able to come to the end of her attainment is her supreme joy, her final freedom.”
I taught my children this by letting them run until their breath failed, then showing them how the wind still waited beyond their tired legs. Do not stop your running because you fear…
“The raindrops kissed the earth and whispered,—We are thy homesick children, mother, come back to thee from the heaven.”
I saw this truth when the first storm broke over my garden and every drop seemed to seek its own soft bed in the soil. Do not fear the weeping of the sky, for it is but a child returning to the arms that made it.
“She had, according to her opportunities, thought and pondered, striven and suffered, dived into the depths of existence, and achieved something which surely cannot be without its value to people whose evolution in history took a different way altogether.”
I watched a child pick up a fallen leaf and trace the veins where the sun had touched it before the wind moved it. In that quiet moment, he did not…
“The mind, sharp but not broad, sticks at every point but does not move.”
I sat in my study for hours yesterday, arguing with myself until my throat was dry, yet I could not turn to look at the garden where the wind had already rearranged the leaves. My thoughts were like a needle piercing the same thread over and over, sharp and sure but nowhere near the field I sought.
“But that side of our existence whose direction is towards the infinite seeks not wealth, but freedom and joy.”
Friend, before the sun goes down, let us put down the cup we hold so tightly and ask ourselves if we are drinking from it or merely guarding its weight. Do not fill your hands with more than you can carry, for the earth is wide enough for what you truly need to live. Turn your face from the endless chase of things that never satisfy, and look instead at…
“He who is too busy doing good finds no time to be good.”
I sat alone with a bowl of rice and saw the truth in this hunger. We rush to serve others while our own bellies remain empty, forgetting that kindness cannot flow from a distracted spirit. One must pause to eat, to feel the warmth of life within, before one can truly offer love to the world.