American essays -- 20th century; Child development; Children; Education
It expressed something very real to me; yet there is not power in words
to portray the exact feeling. All the objects of nature have their
spiritual dimensions also for those who dwell much in the Unseen. These
unusual children see the material object merely as an outpost for a
challenging mystery; while, to the material mind, the outpost is all,
and the lavish adjectives and expressions of the former are deplored as
gush or affectation. As a matter of splendid truth, the most marked and
potent of all adjectives and expressions are pitifully inadequate to
express the lustre and radiance which begins at the point where three
dimensions end.
The Valley Road Girl came into the Study one day, saying that this
chapel book should be called _The Hive_. We all thought it a wonderful
name to work toward, yet the unfolding of possibilities has been
steadily interesting since that day.
The inner sanctuaries of occult literature commend the students to look
to the bees. The pattern of much that man has still to unfold from his
own soul, for his personal and communal uplift, is already expressed
in the hive. There is a period of larva, and a period of wings to each
cycle. Such matters call to those of spiritual discernment. One feels
on the verge of great revelations for humanity, beyond the thing called
death, as he studies this miniature model of a great democracy.
The most fascinating love episode I ever read was the Nuptial Flight in
Maeterlinck's _Life of the Bee_. The majesty of winging to the sun, the
falling back of the weaker-winged suitors, the commanding isolation of
sun and sky, fusion under the mighty beat of the wings of the queen,
the broken body of the male, the mother's return to the shadow and the
labour of the generative wheel--magically, it all opened a vista to
the great renunciations, the great passions and aspirations ahead for
the human soul, great fusions of the future, marriages truly made in
heaven, the inevitable trinity of all matings--the drama of love and
death.
For her one high noon flight in June, the queen toils through years.
She brings back from that superb instant the swarming cities of the
future. On and on, she unfolds her fecundity in the dark, a prodigious
and Herculean labour; from the human standpoint a task of intolerable
pain and monotony. The queen's labour is scarcely more difficult than
the tasks assigned to the hosts of workers, which appear to be denied
any separate episode of emancipation. Yet, equally with the queen,
they share the communal spirit; and no one who has stood among the
hives at the end of a long summer day, and heard the song of bounty and
deep-hearted content, can deny the peace that dwells among the myriad
of skilled artisans, each with his perfectly appointed task.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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