Ants

We sit on the park bench under the pergola. He is eating a bag of potato chips and his big sister is playing on the swings.
"Are they good, Teddy?" I ask, by way of conversation. He nods, imperceptibly, the faintest inclination of his head, which says "Good is hardly the word. These things are absolutely delicious. Never, in all my years, all two of them, have I tasted anything as great as these." He spontaneously holds one up for me. He's that sort of kid.

Too soon the packet is finished.

"Teddy go on swing now," he says, more by way of information giving than of request.

He gives me the empty bag, jumps down off the seat and makes his way towards the swings, which involves him clambering across a row of large stones. I turn to put the packet into the trashcan when his voice rings out with increasing urgency,

"Papa," he calls. "PAPA!" I run to him, imagining that he has somehow fallen and got stuck or, maybe, hurt himself. He is lying, face down on one of the large rocks. I get to him and he turns to me, face lit with excitement. "Papa!", he says. Look!" Crawling across the rock, inches from his nose, is a single ant. A particularly small ant. He stares, transfixed by the sheer marvellousness of it. "Look Papa. Look!"

I squat down beside him. "It's called an ant, Teddy."
He tries the word out for himself. "Ant."
"See," I say, "there's another one. They are very small aren't they?"

And I have already begun the work of breaking his enchantment. I've given a name to this wonder. I've made its size and the number of them important factors in the definition of what it is. I've furthered the work of prising his attention away from the immediacy of the world and cocooning it in words, words and more words.

He rushes off and joins Ada on the big, circular swing. He is now onto his next experience but his amazement sits with me all that day, and in fact for most of the week since. Jesus said, Unless you become as one of these little children you cannot enter the Kingdom of God. An ant is a miraculous thing. How can a fully functioning digestive system and nervous system and respiratory system and reproductive system and little proto consciousness fit into a body so small? Teddy is absolutely right. It is gobsmackingly amazing. I am such a sophisticated man. I surround myself with words and drown myself in analysis and thought, and in doing so, I miss the language of the Universe. A language in which Teddy is fluent, and in which he will remain fluent until we all educate him out of it.

Comments

Elaine Dent said…

Loved this. Thank you. Mary Oliver once again: "Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it." Teddy did all three. So simple. So foreign to us...at least the astonish part.

14 February 2020 at 08:06

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

Kindle

Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on. I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire. Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Return to Middle Earth

We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night. My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old

Available Light

Search This Blog