The teacher watched him silently. He felt both excitement and guilt as impatience slowly overwhelmed him. More guilt perhaps. It was a guilt that took on two forms, loosely clasped together by the smear of his uneasy excitement. 

The first was the abstracter guilt. It was the guilt that arose because of the humbling it had inflicted. It was a guilt that was like the wind, slapping the face of an agnostic into a reasonable belief - strictly, yet gently. It was a guilt that pierced a surrendering sensation into the heart of a prince who has witnessed disease, old age, poverty and death and when that particular prince had he goes beyond an existential joy ride, realizing that one cannot forsake the extremes of pain and gratitude - because one cannot forsake love.

The teacher never thought that he would ever feel such a form of guilt. He never thought so, because he thought that he had already felt it before. He always reminded his students - never water a plant because you feel that you have to. The care for plants and animals are never to be a routine obligation from a higher species to a lower species. One has to understand the universal language, one has to feel the harmony that is provided in cycles and patterns of nature's art, one has to love nature, not because of its beauty nor because of its complexity, but because of its spirit. The spirit of nature which points so strongly at the spirit of the One who wrote down all of it in the first place - and that One who wrote down all of it is also the one who crafted the spirit of man. 

It was the same hand that blew breath into both.

Nature was sufficient, he had argued. No need for the wooden toy cars, the wooden elephants, the wooden houses... the crafts of a mere man should take a back seat to the crafts of the First hands.

"He will only finish, earliest by tomorrow night."

It was this reminder of his second form of guilt that caused the teacher to feel himself close to tears. 

"You don't have to wait for him to finish this piece of course," the owner of the orphanage laughed as she walked to the cupboard to retrieve one of the boy's wooden roses. A rightful gift for an honourable professor, she thought. 

The teacher held back his tears, looked at the owner who was walking towards the cupboard, and then took a last look at how the blind boy was working on his wooden rose and then silently walked away.