The Tamarind Tree

My grandmother, who was my spiritual teacher, always used the tamarind tree to illustrate the power of ordinary people. The tamarind is a big tree, with very small, thin leaves. On a hot day, the people of my old state of Kerala like to sleep in its shade. The leaves are so numerous and are packed so closely together that they protect us from the tropical sun just as if they were one large canopy. “Little Lamp, you don’t have to look for big people,” Granny would tell me. “Look for little people like yourself, then band together and work in harmony.”

So don’t be intimidated by position or power or wealth. If little people like you and me work together, we can do a great deal to transform the world. Taken together, these small daily efforts to improve our ordinary lives live up to a very powerful force that, in the years to come, can become a kind of spiritual revolution, providing a firm foundation for the kind of political, economic, and ecological improvements we need to make.

This excerpt is from Eknath Easwaran's book Renewal.