Little Children Singing

I rememer this song that I sung as a kid in school:
Little Children Singing
God Delights To Hear
Little Voices Ringing
With His Praise Sincere.

I was full of children the last three weeks.
There was at first an article on 'a pint-sized bundle of energy' who won the first rank in a national talent search examination.
Then it was a day-long camp with children of Akshara Abhyas - a weekly gathering where a bundle of brilliant children learn to sing shlokas in Sanskrit and Tamil and listen to and tell stories. The camp was at the Samvit Sagar Ashram of Swami Suddhananda along the East Coast Road in Uthandi near Chennai.
The little ones were free of parents breathing down their neck as the watched a peacock and waited for it to spread out its feathers, chased four white geese, which created such a racked and filed into their pen.
Then there was lunch, games, chanting and fun which ended at the beach nearby where the tied-up ones broke loose and revelled in the shrieking and shouting that they were allowed to do.
Swahilya Auntie (myself) who sheperded them all became such a friend for them at the end of the day and they wanted more of this more often.
*****
A week later at the same Ashram, I volunteered to be a house-parent for five boarders studying in Suddhananda Vidyalaya. That was another load of fun that landed on my lap. When they were off to school, I spent four full days in meditation under an ancient banyan tree, reading in my room, watching the rain fall on the lush green Ashram, thick with the smell of nature, watching the Bay of Bengal far away at day and hearing its roaring voice at night, taking the children on a beach walk to the Jagannath Temple at the neighbouring Kanathur and having fun with the silence I am surrounded in.
Coming back to office on busy Mount Road after all the Silence was like an emergency landing jolt to my schedule and surroundings. But life's all about mixing and matching sound and silence - action and inaction, matter and space, everything and nothing.
*****