One day, I was pushing my then-toddler on a swing while we waited for her big sister to get out of school. One of the dads was doing the same thing, idly pushing a swing and waiting for the bell to ring. As he pushed, he looked up at the sky.
“Look at the clouds,” he said. “They’re so cool! I never really looked at clouds before.”
I didn’t know such a thing was possible, to never look at clouds.
Clouds are some of my favorite things in the whole world to look at and think about. I sometimes tell my kids that God could have come up with so many ways of making the world function, but he seems to have chosen the beautiful and interesting and dramatic way, over and over and over again. He could have designed some other mechanism to move water up and down and around the water cycle — something dull or unchanging or even invisible — but he chose to design this system that’s so elegant, beguiling, ever-changing and recklessly beautiful. Clouds! And all we have to do is look up.
The same is true for so much of the natural world: the way seeds turn from tightly closed secret chambers into brave, tender little beings standing on their own; the way rocks and soil are ceaselessly churned up through the relentless jaws of continental plates. Heck, God could have made the world colorless. Soundless. Scentless. He could have organized the food chain so that birds are not necessary, but he chose to fill the world with strange, beautiful, sometimes nutty and hilarious creatures who not only hop and fly and swoop around, they make music as they go. Are you kidding me? And all we have to do is look up!
And that’s just the stuff we know about! That’s just the stuff we can see with a quick glance around us as we hustle from the car to wherever our next appointment is. There is also an immense natural world that is hidden from us, unfathomably busy with its own designs, that we don’t even know about: things working under the surface of the ground, things too small for us to see, things hidden within our own cells; secret signals between trees, arcane signs passed from species to species and generation to generation. Fungal kingdoms, pheromones, neural memories. Things under the sea; things under the ice; things beyond our atmosphere. The sheer liveliness of the world is too much to comprehend.
I’m lucky that both my parents taught me it was normal and rational to look at the natural world with fascination and delight, because it is fascinating and delightful. To have been raised this way is a gift, and for a moment, on the playground that day, I was crushed by the thought this man had been denied that gift for decades. In maybe 40 years, no one had taught him to look up.
But then I thought: How wonderful that it’s not too late. …Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.
