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When I visited the Iguazu Falls in Argentina I was shown round by an official guide who was very knowledgeable and very communicative. He was a mature man, had been guiding the waterfall tours for more than ten years as he told us, and was doing it with a zest and a fervour that added the effectiveness of his commentaries to the marvellous spectacle of the 275 falls along a two-mile water front.
“The Devil’s Throat” is one of the most marvellous views in the world, bringing the astonished spectator within a few feet of the falling waters in their strength, their volume, their deafening roar, their raining foam, their power, their majesty. Nature’s art in the wildness of the virgin forest.
As we had become quite friendly along the tour, I told our guide as we took our leave:
- I admire you for the enthusiasm with which you have shown us the falls.
- I say what I feel, sir.
- I can see it, but then you have told us that you have been showing the same sights day by day for over ten years.
- Yes, that’s true.
- And don’t you get bored some times? Repeating every day the same thing, however wonderful may the show be, doesn’t generate routine, even boredom?
- Yes, at times, but I try to cheer up the visitors and I appreciate my own luck as I can daily contemplate this wonder that you pay for seeing while I am paid for showing it to you.
- I congratulate you on it.
- And now, please allow me one question, sir. You’ve told me you are a priest, aren’t you?
- Yes, I am.
- So you say mass every day?
- Yes, I do.
- That is, you repeat more or less the same prayers every day?
- That’s what I do.
- And don’t you get bored some times?
- I too try to cheer up my parishioners and I appreciate my own luck to say mass daily.
- I see, but then I have an advantage over you: I change my audience every day, while you have always before you the same congregation. I too appreciate you and your work; and, please, remember always the waterfall.
I will remember it for life.
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The Iguazu Falls were for me one of the most beautiful landscapes I’ve seen in my life. From a more pragmatic point of view they may seem just the right spot to build a power station. Rabindranath Tagore describes an experience he had on the Ganges.
“I was one day travelling on a small boat along the river Ganges. It was a perfect afternoon in autumn. The sun had just set, and a cosmic silence had descended upon the horizon. The surface of the waters, without a wrinkle, reflected the varied hues of the sunset. The sands on either sight shone as the iridescent scales of a sea monster.
While our boat advanced silently in the middle of the river, a huge fish suddenly jumped out of the water, disappeared again in its depths, and its flying scales painted for an instant on the air a heavenly rainbow of magic splendour. A living signature to wave goodbye to the setting sun.
I felt I had received a friendly greeting from another world, and my heart jumped at the unexpected messenger of joy. Then, suddenly, I heard the boat’s helmsman heave a sigh of resignation and say: ‘There goes a dish of fish!’
For him the jumping fish was the image of a cooked fish on a dining table. He had seen the fish only through his hunger. His appetite conditioned his sight. He missed the beauty of the moment…, and he didn’t eat the fish!
Isn’t that what happens, at time, with life itself?”
(Sadhana of the Spiritual Life, Afrodisio Aguado, Madrid 1957, p. 150)
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Tagore writes in the same book:
“Our work is not our rest. And yet, the river finds its rest in its flowing to the sea; the fire finds it in its burning; the flower in its wafting its perfume. Not so with us. For us our work is not our rest. Our work feels heavy on us because we do not take it up with zest, we do not embrace it, we do not welcome it.
Would that our souls would fly towards you as the flame, run to you like the river, give out their perfume as the flower!”
(175)
He gives another comparison:
“If a savage in his ignorance, on seeing the care and reverence with which white men treated and kept their banknotes, would think they had a magic power to grant any wishes, he would try to get as many of them as possible, would keep them, would hide them, would worship them in many ways…, till, at the end, tired of all his efforts he would sadly see that those papers had absolutely no value in themselves and were worth nothing.
Whatever we have received in this life is for us to use, to exchange, to give. Our heart has its value in our giving it out. If we keep it in hiding, it becomes useless.”
(119)
Then he tells us Kabir’s legend, the Benares saint in the XV century who worked and lived for the unity of Hindus and Muslims in the worship of the one God.
“When Kabir died, the Hindus wanted to incinerate his body, while the Muslims wanted to bury it, according to their different customs. When they were quarrelling among themselves, the saint appeared to them and told them: ‘Lift the shroud that covers my body, and see what is under it.’ They did so, and instead of the body they found a heap of white Champa flowers. The Muslims buried half of them in Maghar, in a place revered till our days as the saint’s tomb, and the Hindus cremated the other half in Benares.
Touching and fitting end of the life of a man who had spread the perfume of his poems over the beautiful teachings of two great faiths.”
(218) |
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