To A T

I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children,

you will never enter the kingdom of heaven,

Matthew 18:3

Sometime last night a facebook friend published the following status.

My daughter asked Santa for a dragon again this year. This time she was more specific due to some confusion last year. She got a stuffed animal dragon. This time she has clearly stated that she wants a REAL dragon and it should be as big as our house. Clear specs, but I suspect that Santa will not be able to deliver.

What a smart child! And how foreign, it turns out is her way of thinking to so many of us adults who responded to the status. Here’s a sampling.

That’s a paradox. Any kid who asks for a dragon clearly has not been good enough to receive a dragon. — Anon.

I’m thinking a video of your house, with CGI dragon.

That or a lump of coal… at least it breaths real fire. — Anon Again

Ask her why does she need a dragon to protect her or fight against. — 3rd Anon

1. Doctor a video of a dragon and your house. 2. Show it to her. 3 Take her outside and show her the coal “droppings” that the dragon left. 4. Explain that Santa is keeping the dragon until she is old enough to care for it (16?, 18? 21?) Good luck! — 4th Anon

Maybe the dragon that you find might have some problems controlling his invisibilty. — Anon Five

There is that facebook game,
Dragons of Atlantis — Mine

I think she wants the dragon as a pet. Maybe something she can fly on occasion.– Mother of Child In Question

That response pulled me up short as I thought of this precocious little girl, arms and legs wrapped around the neck of her dragon as she and it fly north along the Delaware River Valley gorge. Sometimes they’d rise high on summer thermals. Other times they’d glide through whipping wet snow as it falls. They’d visit exotic lands north of here and bring wonder and awe to children and adults watching with opened mouths far below.

Perhaps, I thought, they’d even inspire a return to peaceful pursuits: gardening, small farming, neighborhood barbeques and tramps over hills and through dales. Perhaps the awe and wonder of seeing a little girl and her dragon flying would bring us to our senses and stop the destruction inherent in our American way of life.

What struck me about my own and other adults responses to her request of Santa was the innate inability most of us had in even grasping what this child was about. Our thoughts were about possible “bad touching” or use of the only magic we any longer can believe in: the development of electronic cyber-images. We imagined games or sleights of hand like those of David Copperfield or some backyard magician who performs at birthday parties in the summer.

Or, being thoroughly adults, we stooped to that most adult of responses to our children: the strangulation of imagination and creativity, by passing off what our children see as though what they see isn’t there. Trust me, by the time they are seven or eight it will no longer be there. We’ll have crushed and extracted the wonder from their lives and they will have withdrawn those dreams into the inmost recesses of their souls. Where they will remain; eventually becoming forgotten except to the soul. 

In other words we saw a world without magic and wonder, a world with no peace, no beneficent Nature. We saw only the world we’ve been conditioned to see: bloody in tooth and claw and there to have the last ounce of profit and affluence squeezed from it. We saw trickery rather than relationship and magic. And, of course, we do such things for the best of reasons: we want our children to live in the real world. But is that the world we push them toward when we extinguish creativity and wonder, their abilities to feel awe? 

So my final response to the parents was this: More of us need dragons so we can fly on them occasionally. Not only would the world be a safer place, but the planet would be full or wonder and awe that we could all see. Rather than just being full of wonder and awe that we seem to miss all too often.

That’s what strikes me as true. Perhaps Syd is that little child who can lead us. Perhaps the memories of my daughters and sons and their own imagination and their own offerings of wonder and awe so long ago can help me recall again the times when I was subject to wonder and awe as well. Recall when the gods and goddesses actually walked the earth and spoke to me. I do remember then. Am I insane for having had the experiences? I rather think not. Nor were you. 

Instead as we, I, “become adult” we, I, am/are expected to replace wonder and awe with shock and awe. Something that also occurred to me as I was making that final response.

We ask for creativity and imagination even as we choke it in the coils of its own beauty and magic.

Americans are rumored to be “hard-headed realists.” I see almost no evidence of that. Instead I see plenty of evidence that our “hard-headed realism” is actually a “head-buried-in-sand fantasy” that allows us to believe less frequently than any other nationality on planet Earth that human caused global warming exists and threatens the very life of all human beings.

Our exemplar of “hard-headed realism” is that of the Koch brothers using their billions to see to it that media and politics steers Americans swiftly toward some terror fantasy world where the last human suffocate, drown, or burn to death in an apocalyptic destruction brought on by greed, gluttony and addictions so severe that we deny their existence at all. Yeah, “hard-headed” means mining the very last dollar out of the planet while the planet itself dies.

Syd, I hope you get that dragon for Christmas. I hope you sit in your yard and converse with that wise old beast. I hope you learn to fly with it and become aware of just how magical the world really is. Unlike Puff, who disappeared as Jackie grew older, I hope your dragon stays with you for the rest of your life and that both of you go on inspiring imagination, wonder and awe in old women who sometimes forget just how gorgeous, amazing, aswesome and wonderful this world is.

You and your dragon keep watch over small farms, farmer’s markets, heritage crops, poetry, music, finger paints and the warmth of a kitchen in the summer when the light stays long and friends gather at the hearth to trade stories and feel how good and awesome it is to be human, and together. *kiss*