Question

Sol asks, "Where did the first flower come from? I know that all the other flowers came from seeds dropped by that flower, but where did the first one come from?"

I love when they ask these kinds of questions; the ones with no answers, at least not that I could give. They make me pause and breathe in all that is mysterious and beautiful about the world. Their minds are boundless, with room for infinite possibilities, and endless stories. I think partly because they aren't tethered to language; aren't limited by our rudimentary, albeit at times elegant, tools for understanding. They just do, and feel, and are, and we teach them that there is a word, worse yet, a running commentary for all of this. And we value it so much, and rely on it so heavily that it becomes such a desirable commodity. And we praise them for their efforts to become more like us, when really what we want is to become more like them.

Luna asks me over and over to tell her the story of her birth. She knows it now, and can tell it back to me almost verbatim, often jumping into my telling with the next scene or words said. It occured to me too late to ask her to tell the story of her birth, and whatever psychic memories of that night that stayed with her, have all been tangled up and mishapen by my words.

These days I'm thinking a lot about the power of words, the premium we put on language. Sol is devouring the written word, staying up reading to himself, some nights two to three hours after we've said good-night. And Luna is in the process of playing with the power imbued by a well-timed phrase or just the right intonation of a single word. I'm also, as always, fine-tuning my parenting; thinking about praise and criticism and all the unspoken ways that I do and don't relate to my children. It's heavy stuff.

I think we'll go outside for a while, let the chilled winds clear out some of the clutter.

Comments

[bexn]

That was a really interesting article! Can't wait to see everyone soon.

[Lorraine]

I know. It made me think so much about my entire education, but especially about TJ and all this pressure and false achievement because we were all so smart. So much of it felt like a desperate struggle to keep up appearances instead of actually trying to learn anything.

[Mike Janssen]

The elegance of language is only evident at all because words are usually so clumsy.

Recently I was doing yoga with Catherine, and afterward I found myself in a totally different mental space. One thing I noticed was that I didn't want to speak at all because words suddenly felt too violent and wrong. I don't think I had ever experienced that before.