Growing Versions

Almost immediately after Cornelius (the gecko) came to live in my son's room,my son has spent a lot of time creating a "jungle" atmosphere for him.  It started with him drawing with green window marker all over the side of Cornelius' terrarium. At first we admonished him, but now that side of his living quarters is Cornelius' favourite place to hang out. We think he feels safer behind all those marker strokes. It is very jungle like for him. The next addition was bringing the contents of the fruit bowl up to his room. Each bedpost had an apple sitting on it, until we insisted on it being returned to the kitchen. The latest was a diorama of a jungle with pasta.  These days, he is full of purpose about jungles.  "What I cannot create, I cannot understand." Richard Feynman

My kids are in the habit of making maps. The maps are not necessarily of places that I am familiar with, but map drawing is a regular part of their activities.  My daughter likes to have maps drawn for her so she can find things (like birthday presents). I like to think that this fascination with making maps corresponds with their emerging concept of time. My daughter has started noticing that some shows that are supposed to start at 6EST, really start at 7 AST here. As their concepts of time develop, their idea that I can be here and you can be there at the same time and that there is an invisible line connecting us is gelling. Two seemingly disconnected points can be connected. Map making also requires that you can visualize a way that cannot be seen all at once. There is a path.  There are intersecting paths.  They lead us from here to somewhere else. We can get there from here. There is a way  to get from here to somewhere else, even if we can't see it. ...

I have heard that many people who fish on boats can't swim.  At first, that seems perplexing.  It seems like a crazy contradiction. Recently, I heard a seasoned fisherman explain that when you've been on the ocean long enough you come to understand that you are but a speck out there.  Your power has little on the ocean's. I love swimming. I can't get enough of it, swimming in the ocean is my favourite. Ocean swimming invigorates me and evaporates the rigid boundaries I usually encase myself in. Last summer, I began to understand a little more deeply why many people who work in the fisheries don't bother to learn to swim.  I went on a whale watching tour.  It was an open zodiac with four little children.  I was on edge the minute I got in the boat. The kids themselves and the adults (from what I could tell) were thrilled to be where they were, but for me, I was severely dislocated, practically disabled by my fear. I felt stranded in a place that seeme...