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Some recreational musical surfing of a favorite songstress, Imogen Heap, has produced the discovery of a wonderful poem, “Where the Mind is Without  Fear”, which I have reproduced below.

What’s fascinating is the poem’s origins; the author, Rabindranath Tagore, is considered one of the greatest writers in modern Indian literature. A Bengali poet, novelist, educator, Tagore was the first non-European winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 and hung out with the likes of Gandhi and Einstein. He was awarded the knighthood in 1915, but surrendered it in 1919 as a protest against the Massacre of Amritsar, where British troops killed 400 Indian demonstrators protesting colonial laws.

The poem was born during a time of political upheaval when the citizens of India protested their colonial government in the early 20th century. Yet the words seem germane  in the current political upheaval in the U.S. with the Occupy Wall Street movement. The poem may also feel relevant on an individual level whether the personal struggle is external or internal.

Where The Mind is Without Fear

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action–

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

~Rabindranath Tagore