Minimalism & Birthdays

This was the question for me when my first born was a year old. We had move to the farm in Dharmapuri, Tamilnadu in 1992. After my internship at Auroville, I had taken it upon myself to regenerate this 12 acre piece of land. My routine was mulching during the day and carrying water to pour to the tree saplings during the evenings! We had started a nursery with indigenous tree seeds. The saplings needed care while in the nursery and later in the land where they were planted. With an average rainfall of 450 mm the water resources of our land were nil. I had to carry water from a spring around 350 meters away in the valley. But we needed to water the saplings and I used to give them one liter a day. Each sapling was told that I would be watering it only for one year and that they had to care for themselves thereafter. The process of healing the land was deeply connected with self-healing and social change.
So, when my first daughter was one year old, I wanted to year mark the day. I had already decided to do Homeschooling. I had gone through the process of unschooling and was very conscious about positive parenting. Being a part of nature came naturally to me. So naturally I decided to introduce her to the healing energy of plants. We commemorated the day with her planting a tree near the house. I dug the pit the previous day with great difficulty as the land is full of rocks. Next morning, as she woke up at 6 am we sang her favorite song and took her to the pit and planted the Cassia Siamea sapling at the entrance to the homestead. Then we watered it and made a fence around it so that the cows and goats don’t get at it.
On her birthday, we gave her two precious gifts. One was the company of a living being who would grow with her and provide her with clean air and self-healing power for the rest of her life. And the second was the responsibility of taking care of it. Every evening both of us would take water and give to the sapling. As she became independent and started walking with a small bucket of water, she did it every day by herself.
The splurging and consumption of things and services that happens in the name if birthday celebration is only destroying the clean air and water that we owe our children. How come intelligent adults like us don’t see what we are doing to the child’s future in the name of celebration. Our children need to know natural self-healing practices. The homeschooling parent who is looking for a platform for parenting solutions needs to find alternative methods of doing the traditional celebrations. It’s not the birthday that needs to be celebrated. It is the life of the child that needs to be celebrated and that will be possible only if we hand over to our children the planet better than we found it!
So how do we do something similar in apartments in the cities? We can easily plant one herb on each birthday in pots! Tulsi, aloevera, insulin plant, etc. Even flowers and greens! The beauty is the fact that there is something new to observe in the plant almost every day! And the child can talk to it, care for it observe it and learn a lot of things about the plant world. We can take any seeds from the kitchen and put them in pots to make magic happen!
If space is an issue, there is always the possibility of building a relationship with the gardener of the nearby park, and plant something there and visit it as often as possible. Or make friends with some farmer and take time to plant on his land and visit the farmer as often as possible. And as the relationship with the farmer and the land builds up the child has the privilege of having trees that are growing along irrespective of the fact that it’s not on our land. Oxygen cannot be owned right!

Penned from conversations with Meenakshi Ma 🙂