Of Lightning and Jellyfish

While sitting by my six-year old daughter's bed last night as she drifted into sleep, questions continued. Wanting sleep to arrive, I gently told her to ask me one more question. Genevieve's final question to her mommy on the lovely spring evening was this:  "Why did god make the world so complicated, with lightning and jellyfish and everything?"

When she awoke this morning, I followed the advice of my dear friend Lou Harry and had a lovely conversation with my sleepy-eyed, pajama-clad daughter. I paraphrased Lou wildly, but am including in this post his words in their entirety because they are beautiful and because I want to remember them and because they made me pause and consider the glorious complexity of our world and my place of wonder in it.  

Lou said, "You want to know a secret, sweetie? All your life you are going to meet people who think they know who or what god is. And you know what? Maybe one or two of them might be right. But we don't know which ones and they don't know either. So here is what we are going to do. We're going to look at lightning and say 'wow' and we're going to look at jellyfish and we're going to say 'wow' and we're going to be thankful that we live in a world that is never ever ever going to get totally boring because there's always new stuff to learn about lightning and jellyfish and car motors and Velcro and bumble bees and tomatoes and daffodils and parakeets and people.  And maybe the more we know and the more we feel the closer we get to whatever god is. And that was the most awesome question I heard all day...maybe even all year."

Yesterday morning I visited the Isamu Noguchi Museum with Genevieve's first grade class and was reminded anew of all that Noguchi has taught me throughout my life. Noguchi shaped my vision of what it is to live in the world as an artist. I understand because of him that the medium—stone, words, clay, paint, musical notes, bodies in motion, voices raised—is just the stuff you move around to achieve your vision. The medium has its own properties and "free will," just as the artist has hers, and art is the give-and-take-dance between the two.

This post is not about god. I, in no way, feel qualified to write on that subject. But it is about approaching life with wonder, embracing complexity, and being wide-eyed and naive and never ever bored. No matter what I undertake, as it unfolds the vastness of what I still have to learn becomes quickly apparent. It is that way with child welfare and adoption after 20 years in the field. It is that way with pottery and drawing and theatre and fiction and public policy and parenting and friendship and love and on and on. And, four years later, it remains acutely so with running.

On my gentle four mile run today I thought about Genevieve's question and about the newness with which both she and I view the world. And I thought about Isamu Noguchi, chisel in hand before his glorious basalt structures. I have been running seriously for four years. It began with two mile runs three times each week and it grew. By this time four years ago I had completed my first 10K race and was contemplating a fall marathon. Five marathons, several half marathons, and many other distances later, I still consider myself a beginner with so much to learn. And I still find unbelievable joy each time my running shoe-clad foot hits the pavement.

As I develop as a runner, my teachers are my running friends and teammates, but especially, because of what  Noguchi taught me, my teachers are my own body, the air passing through my lungs, and the ground beneath my feet. I will now add to my list of teachers the lightning and the jellyfish.