Considering the Heavens

I was sitting in the pool the other day with one of my buddies when he looked up and saw the sky – or at least that’s what I thought he saw. Being only 18 months old, he’s not very articulate, but he looked up with rapt attention into the clear blue and I’d swear he said ‘sky’ (or at least ‘ky’ which is 2/3rds of it and impossibly cute).

A grandparent’s hearing is generous. Anywhere near the target is a bull’s eye for me. Of course eventually he’ll need (and want) to learn to say the whole word and perhaps even use sentences, but for now anything that I can interpret through context as a real word gets full credit and enthusiastic repetition and praise. I’m always willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. My job is encouraging and appreciating. Leave the evaluation and correction to others.

But there’s so much to learn and sometimes I despair for him. Not that he won’t learn everything he needs to know—but that the world is in such a desperate place. Between the pandemic, our political melt-down, the reckoning of our inhumanity to our black, indigenous and ethnic brothers and sisters, and the planet that is sliding quickly into environmental catastrophe, it’s sometimes hard to know where to look for hope moving forward.

In the early eighties Melissa and I were considering having a child but were hesitant to bring a baby into the world that we saw was in crisis even then. (Not to mention our trepidation of the awesome responsibility of being parents.) Melissa went on a small retreat with a then relatively unknown Vietnamese Zen teacher named Thich Naht Hanh. At one point someone asked him about the morality of bringing children into a world on fire. He said you should only have children if you are willing to raise courageous warriors for love.

So when my little friend looked up in some kind of state of amazement—a relatively common state for him—I looked up too. And I repeated what I heard him say: ‘Sky. Sky.’ And we talked about the sky for a little. I explained to him how high and blue it is–how the white clouds float through it unobstructed. He added his occasional and trenchant observation of ‘Ky. Ky.’

Then, after we had discussed the heavenly situation thoroughly, we went back to filling plastic cups with water then dumping them with a splashy delight. Every now and then, however, he would stop and I would stop. Together we would look up at the vast blue ocean of air above our heads—pausing in wonder and in love.