Needs and Wonder
I'm learning a lot by being a grandmother; all those little things - that I was far too anxious as a new mother to observe - that are now available to me at one generation’s remove.
My second grandchild, a baby girl, was born last weekend. I arrived at the hospital within 24 hours of her birth and was astonished all over again at the extraordinary capacity of women to bring forth a new life and bounce back from that ordeal ready to face the 24/7 of the hardest job in the world!
I stayed for several days to help with their transition back home and had those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to just be present with the newly born. The experience that I want to share today is one that concerns the competition - perhaps the most compelling and long-lasting competition for mortals – between the needs of the physical entity and the wonder of the inquiring imagination.
The set up was this: it was evening and I was sitting in a chair near the French windows that overlook the backyard. I was holding the infant in my hands and rocking her gently so that I could gaze into her face. My back was towards the window so that I was facing into the semi-lit interior of the room. The baby was intermittently fussing and relaxing and had just screwed her face up again and taken a deep breath and it seemed that she was about to launch into a loud protest about the state of internal affairs, when I saw her eyes open and suddenly stare over my shoulder. She stopped in mid-breath, her complaint instantly forgotten, and her focused gaze continued for a full minute. She was absolutely still, in rapt attention over something that she was seeing over my shoulder.
Speaking quietly to my son I asked him if he could look out the window and tell me if there was anything out there to be seen. He glanced out and said there was not – just the nighttime sky. I cautiously turned my head over my shoulder to take a quick peek and saw at once what the attraction must be: a deep, dark night sky framed against the bright squares of white molding. I squinted my eyes a little bit to try to emulate the fuzzy focus of a newborn’s vision and even with the blur I could see how dramatic those dark black squares inside of the bright white frames must look.
Carefully holding the newborn as still as I could so as not to interrupt her attention I gazed at her gazing at PATTERN and tried to imagine what that must be like. In her brand new world of swirls and blobs and moving ghosts of color, here was suddenly a static image that proclaimed itself in bold blocks – in black and white and straight repeating lines. It must indeed have been a startling revelation!
It reminded me of the exhibit at MOMA held some 20 years ago that focused on the abstract artist, Piet Mondrian, with his neat dark lines holding his contrasting colors. His inspiration, from his own words, was the yearning for spiritual truth through direct intuition, supported by the inspiration of nature. His was a state of wonder at the glory of the spiritual world and he wanted to convey that through his paintings.
Even without the benefit of language to express one's feelings, the experience of wonder is obvious to the onlooker. It touched me deeply to witness the triumph of wonder over the immediacy of need in a little human only three days old. I know that wonder does not always triumph over need, and whatever triumph there is must be short-lived in order that the organism survives. My granddaughter was quite prepared to take up her howl against hunger once the novelty of the vision of the windows had worn off. But to know that little Homo Sapiens have the instinct for wonder was deeply reassuring.
As a final thought, I am reminded of the wonderful Zen story of the man chased by a tiger who comes to the edge of a cliff and leaps off to save himself, catching hold of a branch growing on a small ledge overhanging a steep ravine. As he dangles there, suspended between death by tiger above and death by rocks below, he notices a single strawberry growing on the ledge. Plucking it he pops it in his mouth and is transported by its sweetness.
Ahhh, life! The wonder and the need.