The Mother had lived a 'human' life to
all outward appearance, and had made the passage from childhood to girlhood,
and then to womanhood and motherhood; and she had dreamt dreams, and seen
mystic visions. She had read and talked and meditated, she had cultivated music
and painting and letters, but it was the inner Flame that had always lighted
her path, and guided her in her travels in Europe and Africa and Asia. On 29
March 1914 she had found at last what she had been seeking, and Sri Aurobindo
was indeed the Lord of her being and her life. In Japan between 1916 and 1920
she had completed her 'education', and the Japanese feeling for colour and
form, their passion for precision and detail, had fused with her French
intellect with its clarity and sharpness and lucidity and her own feminine
temperament with its impulse towards beauty and protectiveness and
compassionate understanding, and in the result her poise of purpose and radiant
personality had glowed like distant Mount Fuji on a warm bright day. She had
returned to Pondicherry on 24 April 1920, now ready to shoulder the tremendous
task of setting up a pilot project for the promotion of the Life Divine and the
transformation of the earth nature.
The Ashram at Pondicherry had slowly
begun to take a definite shape, and while Sri Aurobindo was the creator-spirit,
the soul, the law, the Mother was the architect, the executrix, of the new
unfoldment. Together the divine collaborators had set all doubts at rest,
cleared whole jungles of mental resistance, harnessed the tides of human
emotion and energy to good purpose, and trained a community of sadhaks ready to
aspire, to labour, to receive, to surrender - to be kneaded and made 'new'.
After Sri Aurobindo's passing, it had been the Mother's role all the more to
force the pace, and carry the work forward. With the slow march of the years,
the circumference of the Ashram's activities had been widening more and more,
but always drawing prime sustenance from the centre, from the Mother herself.
The Ashram was a human microcosm receiving the healing and transforming touch
of the Mother, and responding too, at once agreeably and purposively. But the
real work had only begun, and the Mother at eighty was like a divine child at
the threshold of an endless creative Play. She seemed to bring to her task all
the wisdom of the ages and all the energy concealed in Nature. At eighty, her
children still thought that she was ageless and yet young, that she was distant
yet close to their hearts. On her eightieth birthday, the children were content
to gather around her in limitless love and gratitude.
(Chapter 49, “On The Mother”,
K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Puducherry)
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