Things I Don't Understand

Faucon’s Story has caught me where I live, in several ways. First of all, as many of you know, I am a dryad, and the Aspen is my tree. If anyone is interested in a REAL long poem about a tree, my hymn to the Aspen is here: http://www.dailywriting.net/CrossGrove.htm

Secondly, I have had the same telescopic experience of being able to see for miles. The first time it happened I was about eight. I had climbed the knees of the mountains behind where my Daddy was fishing. I climbed hard and fast for a long time until I came to the ‘top’ of the first burgeoning swell which rises up to become Mount Logan. I looked down and could see my Daddy in the water below me, his arm flicking and dancing as he cast his fly rod. He looked like a toy he was so far away. I looked out and found that I had climbed high enough that I could see out of the canyon and across the entire valley. I could see the tall Wellsville range rising in the west, I could see all the way to where there was a break in the solid circle of mountains before the roll of a single, solitary mountain, whose rounded head was swathed in clouds. I remember putting my hand up to my eyes to shade the sun and realizing that I was looking all the way into Idaho. Suddenly something strange happened to my eyes, an abrupt telescopic jump in my vision. It reminded me of the way you can look at a raindrop on the window and then adjust your eyes and see what is outside the window, looking right through the rain drop. I found that I could see the individual trees on Sand Mountain in Idaho. I could see pine trees and mountain oak and, yes, the dancing aspen.

I was a strange, fey child. I wasn’t shocked or frightened or enlightened. I didn’t even feel particularly surprised. I remember vaguely wondering if I readjusted my eyes if I would be able to see pine cones on the trees. When I tried, my eyes ‘jumped back’ and I was looking across a wide expanse of valley at Sand Mountain with it’s head swimming in whipped cream clouds.

When I finally climbed back down, twilight had come drifting into the canyon and Daddy was packing up his fishing tackle . . . and my fishing tackle which I had typically left laying on the side of the water when I followed a butterfly and ended up climbing up the mountain side. I told him what had happened. He was pulling his rod apart, his pipe clamped in his teeth, his head wreathed by blueish smoke. “Really?” he said, “I’ve never been able to do that. It’s probably because you have such beautiful big eyes.” I suspect I only nodded sagely, completely believing that was exactly the explanation. It wasn’t until the same thing happened to me again as a teenager that I even began to wonder if he had actually believed me. I certainly thought so at the time. I’ve never understood this phenomenon. I doubt it is caused by my having big beautiful eyes, but I have no rational explanation for it.

And then there is the real crux of the story, something that haunted me all the time I was a teacher and as a parent, something I still don’t understand. Why are children sometimes so cruel? Do they learn it from adults and then exhibit it more than adults do because they haven’t developed the discernability to know what is ‘socially correct?’ Are human’s born with the ability to hurt and wound, or do they learn it? The truth is children are not always cruel, they can be the most giving caring people in the world, for they haven’t learned yet that they can be hurt by being open and altruistic. On the other hand, children most definitely can be incredible unfeeling and hurtful. Sometimes, I feel sure, it is because they do not truly understand. Sometimes it is that far too human frailty that says ‘if I put you down, it puts me up,’ ‘if I make you feel small, it makes me big.’ I don’t know where this comes from. I truthfully don’t know if it is inborn or learned. My daughter has a t-shirt with two children on it, black and white, hugging each other. The writing reads: “No one is born a bigot.” I believe this is true; this is something that is learned, almost always from watching and modeling rather than being formally ‘taught’ anything. The most frightening thing about having children, I think, is the realization that they learn from watching.

Faucon says: “I don't know how long I stayed there, swaying in a cradle of gently caressing green and golden fingers, listening to a glittering song of reflected light and what I later came to know as sadness.” I was much older before I realized how different I was and how much my differences cut me off from other people. I was twelve before I met with the mentality that separates and isolates those that are divergent, before I felt the deep hollow echo of sequestration, of segregation that my strangeness caused. Coming at that particular point in life the sadness went deep into melancholy, mournfulness, depression, despondency. It was years before I learned to understand, again, that the word ‘different’ is a synonym for unique, for original, innovative, diverse and new. It was years before I learned to understand, again, that these words and their meanings are positive. I have come a long way, but there are still so many things that I don’t understand.