Buddha

If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.

Buddha

A fellow diarist once wrote this to me in a note, and I was deeply moved:

I am fortunate in that I have a best friend — my granddaughter — who in her everyday discoveries, has given me the gift of sights and sounds as if seen and heard for the very first time. A two-year old squats beside a flower and has to touch the petals to feel its velvety texture. She screams in delight when a ladybug takes flight. She lingers as long as it takes to fully embrace the moment.

This is perhaps why I am not embarrassed when I act “childlike” in expressing my enthusiasm and wonder for something. It does not happen enough.

As we get older, we have that capacity for astonishment at what can only be described as the miracle of life bleached out of us, so to speak. The texture of our perceptions becomes coarsened, familar, used, worn, comfortable, set.

This is not a bad thing, necessarily, is it? We have to “age” don’t we? We have to be seasoned and tempered by the trials, tribulations, joys and accomplishments of life so that we are not as “naive” as when we were young. Life leads to varying levels of maturity and wisdom.

What I miss, however, is that sense of being alive often enough to be never at rest in my waking hours — always alert, youthful, ready for more life. A child has this until he or she is weaned of the capacity for unending discovery and delight by the daily regimens of school and, in later years, work and conformist-enhancing, mind dulling routines and institutions. We all go through years of this, mostly unaware when we are young, until we grab hold of ourselves at pivotal moments in life and ask, “What has happened to the child in me?” What has happened to me?

I think the poets, artists, dreamers and idealists among us never go so far along the accepted paths that they need great awakenings and shake ups in their lives. Some of us, however, need to be jolted into awareness, and this is what gives us a new take on life, an ability to “see” into the heart of things once again.

As Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote:

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all,
in my hand, 
Little flower –
but if I could understand
What you are, root and all,
and all in all, 
I should know
what God and man is.