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To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves

Mahatma Gandhi said, “To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves.” Recently I along with my family went for an early morning Nature Trail at Lavasa and amid peace and silence we walked for several kilometres, watched plants and heard the sound of bird chirping.

After a few hours when we left the garden, it felt like we filled our bodies with the volume of oxygen which we might otherwise have breathed in a month.

What made this so soulful?

I remember my father used to say that farming is the most humble of tasks: “Your head is always bowed and sometimes you have to go down on your knees.”

While poised in this most humble of postures, we begin to work in parallel with God in the creation of the greater world and universe.

Although God’s dimension is infinite and eternal while ours is contained and immediate, we, nevertheless, enter into the same act of creation: to produce, to make life.