Dear Jeyamohan,
I was watching your video about preserving nature and teaching children to live in harmony with it. It set me thinking about our traditions and the way we have understood our relationship with nature.
In fact, our tradition has rarely taught us simply to be with nature. We have either worshipped it or used it for our purposes. Even worship, in a sense, can become another way of using nature to fulfil our own desires. What we have largely neglected is the possibility of being with nature without any intention of possessing it, exploiting it, or seeking something from it.
Nature can be approached in a meditative spirit. We can learn to remain in its presence, observe its movements, and receive the wisdom it silently offers us. A tree, a river, a mountain, or even a small patch of grass can become a teacher if we learn how to look at it. Nature has its own rhythms, its own forms of order, and its own ways of sustaining life. By being attentive to them, we may learn humility, patience, interconnectedness, and a sense of belonging to something larger than ourselves.
This sensibility should be cultivated in childhood. Teachers and gurus once played an important role in shaping a young person’s understanding of the world. They did not merely transmit knowledge; ideally, they helped the young discover ways of seeing and being. Learning to sit quietly beneath a tree, observe the life around us, and experience our place within the natural world should be an essential part of a child’s education. Yet this is almost entirely absent from our educational practices today.
Our education system needs a fundamental transformation in this regard. Most schools are situated in the middle of crowded cities, surrounded by concrete buildings and traffic. In many schools, one can hardly find a tree. Children learn about nature from textbooks, diagrams, and examinations, but they rarely have the opportunity to experience it directly. There are no meaningful programmes to help them understand the life around them or develop an intimate relationship with the natural world.
The tragedy is that we are educating children to acquire information about the world without teaching them how to inhabit it. We teach them to identify plants and animals, but not necessarily to feel connected to them. We speak about environmental protection, but we seldom cultivate the inner sensibility from which a genuine concern for nature can emerge. Unless children develop such a relationship, environmental awareness may remain merely an intellectual idea or a moral instruction.
In this context, the efforts you are making to provide children with an education rooted in nature are truly laudable. What you are attempting is not simply environmental education. It is an effort to restore a lost dimension of human experience: the capacity to be attentive to nature, to learn from it, and to discover a deeper spiritual relationship with the world around us.
I believe such initiatives are especially important today. They may help children grow into adults who do not regard nature as a resource existing for human consumption, but recognise themselves as participants in a larger web of life. Such an understanding cannot be created through instruction alone. It must emerge through experience, sustained attention, and a way of life that allows children to encounter nature directly.
I hope your efforts will continue to grow and inspire others. They may seem modest in the face of the enormous failures of our educational system, but they address something fundamental. To teach a child to be with nature may be one of the most meaningful forms of education we can offer.
With warm regards,
Narayanan Valiyedath
