The Consequences Reveal the Rules

A friend just wrote about the afternoon and evening she spent with her grandchildren. Her passages were full of recounting activities that proved the endless energy and infinite curiosity of small children. I think we all have that energy always, despite a public campaign to train it out of us.

I went to a workshop once in Tucson, AZ. On the front table the moderator had placed an extraordinary photo of a gurgling baby. It was impossible to see it and do anything but grin and feel happiness. He found the picture as a greeting card at a Walgreen's. It made such an impression on him that he and his wife used it as an energizing icon at all of their seminars. He called the kid "Guru Baby Ga-Ga." That one photo spread more joy in a few minutes than many grumps have spread in their whole lives. People were grinning everywhere, like the plague in "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum." Except they weren't dying. They were remembering innocence and joy, bringing it into the present. A child's bright energy can be a rejuvenating force. I recommend frequent exposure.

In the balance of recieving that from kids, I remember my Grandmother and the world of wonder she opened for me with her stories, and more important, with her behavior. As children we osmose. I was lucky. Despite her high strung nature which was her worst enemy, she managed to impart to me a way of being inquisitive about the world on the planes of ideas, people, and things. That was the heirarchy of importance. Yes, name one thing you see, do, be, or have, that did not start as an idea. I guess what I mean is that she was the first to guide me into an appreciation of the what I call the palpability of the invisible.

That phrase, the palpability of the invisible, means to me the feeling tangability of the underlying laws that manifest our experience. I thought about that when I went down to the Bay near Point Richmond yesterday. The water, always complicit to the whims of the wind, looked very much like the aluminum foil that the Catholic school kids used to shape and smooth over the covers of their catachisms. Some of the shore, there, was a tragic mess. The mark of careless man was everywhere to be felt. and yet, amidst it all, the water was the water, doing what water does. It will do it with or without its contents of polution, it will do it without regard to the debris on shore that is equally being treated impartially by the laws of Nature. All of what makes it go will always abide. We are in the position of learning about the magnificence of ourselves by cooperating with it, or about the tragedy of disrespect if we don't. Nature cares not a whit. It is complicit to our desires. However, we always find that the consequences reveal the rules.