ten seconds
what does it mean when a two-year-old you don't know reaches for you?
I had a ten-second experience last week that keeps living in me, like an image from a dream, or a line from a song, that I know means something even if I can’t get to the bottom of what that is.
There’s a paved greenway along the French Broad River here in Asheville. Every day, in all seasons, so long as the skies aren’t going bonkers with rain, there are people out there walking, running, biking, and roller-skating. It’s a mile from our office, and I go there several times a week, after work, to let the river wash my mind.
I was there one afternoon last week when I happened upon a little girl--she looked to be about two years old--and a man I assume was her father. The man was bent over a small tricycle, trying to fix something about it. The little girl was standing with her back to him, looking in my direction. As I walked to within twenty feet of them, she raised both her arms to me, the way kids do when they want you to pick them up, and looked me in the face. She kept her arms outstretched and kept looking me in the face as I came closer. The man was absorbed in whatever he was doing with the tricycle and witnessed none of this.
I was unsure what to do. I wanted to stop and respond to her, to meet her innocent reaching with the warmth and tenderness I’d offer a two-year old whose parent knew me. But her parent did not know me. He was tending to the tricycle and hadn’t seen me, hadn’t noticed his daughter reaching for me, hadn’t had a chance to size me up, and hadn’t sent me any signal of permission. So, instead of stopping, I slowed down, leaned sideways at the waist to be nearer her level, smiled and gave a small wave, said “Hi,” and kept walking. She kept turning toward me and reaching for me the entire time, even as I was several steps beyond her.
And she is still reaching for me, in a way. In my mind, I still see her. I still feel curious about why this little girl was reaching for me, a total stranger. And I am still pondering, wondering, what it means when a child you don’t know reaches for you like that? My mind and heart keep contemplating the image of her, reaching for me with her eyes and arms, turning this image over and over, wondering over it, and asking of it the questions I’d ask of a dream: What is the truth you’ve come to tell me? What is the gift you’re trying to give me? What are you asking of me or from me?
My first thought, as I walked, was that she was something of a Ghost of Earthlings Future, an apparitional ambassador for all humans of her generation, appointed to beseech me and my generation to see how vulnerable she and everyone who will be alive in the year 2100 are to the choices we are making and the lifestyles we are living in 2024. I thought about what the temperature of the planet will be when she’s my age, what parts of the earth will be habitable for humans then, what food she’ll have to eat, the water she’ll drink, the air she’ll breathe, the material and spiritual resources that will be available to her and the ones that won’t. And I felt her begging me, begging us, to see her and think of her, now.
I also thought of her as an ambassador for children living right now, in 2024, in circumstances of horror—children living in places where bombs are dropping and food is scarce, children traversing migration routes across deserts and seas, children in neighborhoods or households that aren’t safe for people of any age, but especially not for children—and again, this two-year old ambassador for the powerless is asking me, a sixty-years-her-senior ambassador for the powerful, to see her and lift her up.
Several times this week, in my psychotherapy office, sitting across from grown-ups who talk with me about their lives, I’ve seen this little girl in them, her arms reaching out from their torsos, showing herself to me and asking for help. There are children in all of us, you know, vulnerable beings whom we largely ignore or forget entirely, and they need our attention and care. Part of my job is to notice these children exiled or hiding in adult minds and bodies, and help the adults learn to commune with them, care for them, and be enriched by the wonder and wisdom these little ones bring.
There are little ones in me, too, of course. I’m often too busy or too scared to see them or spend time with them, but the little girl on the greenway is helping me feel them and be present with them.
And finally, earlier this week, I started reading a Thomas Berry book called The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (1999). Here are the words of the dedication page in that book.
To the children To all the children To the children who swim beneath The waves of the sea, to those who live in The soils of the Earth, to children of the flowers In the meadows and the trees in the forest, to All those children who roam over the land And the winged ones who fly with the winds, To the human children too, that all the children May go together into the future in the full Diversity of their regional communities.
So, perhaps, this little girl is an ambassador not just for human children, past, present, and future, but for non-human children, as well.
And for you, as you see her in your mind, what is the truth she might be telling you? And how are you moved to respond?
(Photo credit: Leah Newhouse / Pexels)
Another bit of verse:
A Prayer for Children
We pray for children
who put chocolate fingers everywhere,
who like to be tickled,
who stomp in puddles and ruin their new pants,
who sneak popsicles before supper,
who erase holes in math workbooks,
who can never find their shoes.
And we pray for those
who stare at photographers from behind barbed wire,
who can’t bound down the street in a new pair of sneakers,
who never “counted potatoes,”
who are born in places we wouldn’t be caught dead,
who never go to the circus,
who live in an X-rated world.
We pray for children
who bring us sticky kisses and fistfuls of dandelions,
who sleep with the dog and bury goldfish,
who hug us in a hurry and forget their lunch money,
who cover themselves with Band-aids and sing off key,
who squeeze toothpaste all over the sink,
who slurp their soup.
And we pray for those
who never get dessert,
who have no safe blanket to drag behind them,
who watch their parents watch them die,
who can’t find any bread to steal,
who don’t have any rooms to clean up,
whose pictures aren’t on anybody’s dresser,
whose monsters are real.
We pray for children
who spend all their allowance before Tuesday,
who throw tantrums in the grocery store and pick at their food,
who like ghost stories,
who shove dirty clothes under the bed, and never rinse out the tub,
who get visits from the tooth fairy,
who don’t like to be kissed in front of the carpool,
who squirm in church or temple and scream in the phone,
whose tears we sometimes laugh at and whose smiles can make us cry.
And we pray for those whose nightmares come in the daytime,
who will eat anything,
who have never seen a dentist,
who aren’t spoiled by anybody,
who go to bed hungry and cry themselves to sleep,
who live and move, but have no being.
We pray for children who want to be carried and
for those who must,
for those we never give up on and for those
who don’t get a second chance.
For those we smother . . . and for those who will grab the hand of anybody kind enough to offer it.
--Ina J. Hughs
A dozen years ago I was standing in the checkout line at ingles when I felt someone take my hand in theirs. I looked and it was a small boy, standing close beside me, looking straight ahead, not up. I elected to do nothing, simply wait in the line. After maybe twenty seconds, he let go of my hand, without looking up, and walked over to the next line and took he hand of a man in that line, who smiled and tossled the boy's hair. Sometimes we are just placeholders, keeping a safe spot in a line.