Don’t Go Hungry!

I offer my obeisance to you Rev. Sri. Sri. Om Swamiji. Wishing you good health, love and Peace🙏Mata Rani Bless you🕉🙏

Children are born with a beautiful vastness of thoughts, and parents, indeed, are the best guides when it comes to grooming them. And what better way than great bedtime stories?

 Since childhood, we all have heard great stories with morals that have truly made us learn to differentiate between good and bad or to remain good or bad.

My Son Karan has this wonderful habit of reading insightful bedtime stories with a lot of visual gestures to his little darling Reya, who just turned four this year.

On her visit to India this time, Reya was gifted with a great set of Indian bedtime storybooks with wonderful morals. The intention was to help feed some good stuff to her tender mind. 

The story narrated to her below is one that most of us had heard when we were kids…

The Grapes are Sour

Once upon a time, a clever hungry fox was roaming around here and there searching for food. Because of hunger, he was feeling weak and tired. Fortunately, he came to a garden where he saw a grapevine laden with bunches of grapes that looked quite ripe and juicy.

The fox looked at the grapes with longing eyes and licked his chops. But the bunches were too high for him, and he was feeling weak. So he sat down for a while to take some rest. On feeling refreshed, he jumped as high as he could to get at the grapes. But he failed to reach them.

Then he again rested for some time and made another bold attempt but was unlucky for the second time.

Forced to give up trying anymore, he just walked away, and instead of accepting his failure, he remarked, “the grapes appeared to be ripe and juicy, but now I see them be quite sour.”

He realises he cannot reach the grapes he desires and therefore defaults to a position of indifference, exclaiming, “The grapes appeared to be ripe and juicy, but I now see them be quite sour!”

the moral of the story being – “it is easy to despise what you cannot get, or you often dislike or disapprove what you can’t have.

True, isn’t it? The story does make so much sense…

But what my son found was that his little darling Reya was too thoughtful and stressed by the end of the story or rather by its moral explained by her father. She couldn’t care less what the story had to say about the true nature of the fox  ( a fox is considered to be very clever, sly, and vicious in behaviour ), for all her thoughts and heart poured out for the poor fox, ‘But Daddy the fox left hungry, even after so much of trying, it must have been really tired, and that’s not a very good thing. I hope it finds food somewhere and can be happy. And daddy, I also wish that someone else finds those grapes and fills his tummy too’.

A small message from a four-year-old, but immense deep was it’s learning…

My son politely patted her head and said,’ you are right, my baby, I do hope the fox gets food to eat too. Don’t worry, it would and very soon, someone else would find those grapes to savour too.

After she had gone off to sleep, my son came out holding his forehead. And as I looked at his puzzled expression and tired eyes, he sat down with a taxing feel and uttered,   ‘Gosh, these moral stories are way too heavy for the little innocent kids to understand. They barely know what is good or bad, wicked or innocent etc. All they know is love and care for one and all, and no one is treated indifferently.

True, little children purely live in the expanse of the moment sans the tales of the past or assumed future. They breathe with an open-heartedness and open-mindedness that brims only in the vivid colors of life, as it is!

The tender little ones have the ability to give birth and serve a new refreshing thought, full of kindness, love and joy, a fully present and unbiased Universe, so to say, in ‘Becoming’. And Parents or elders couldn’t feed their hearts with more gratification than this feeling.

On our paths to growth, we are constantly fed with conditioned norms and herds of believability that assign names to not just humans but to every species in this Universe. And the same cycle of thoughts and patterns is further recreated by many, most of our lives.

As parents, we just have to nurture our tender little young ones by understanding their innate abilities, guiding and honouring their strengths as they grow, and making them aware of their shortcomings but without underlining them too much.

Let’s cherish life at any given point with its innocent childlike twilight that glints through the purity of our eyes which carries multidimensional facets of care and compassion.

Life is fed of pure Love that never ever lets you go hungry! 

Wishing good health and peace to my Osme family and readers. Thank you for your precious time.

Jai Sri Hari 🙏🕉

Siddhika