Thoughts on Having a Three-Year-Old

All civilizations are convinced that in the long ago, giants walked the earth. And so it seems to me as well. Those people who went to the Klondike, who settled the Prairies, who fought the Great War, and then Hitler, and the Cold War, those were giants, and we seem much smaller than they.

As a child, we see as a child. Adults seem enormous from below; much bigger than they do seen face-to-face.

They also seem to have been here forever—a hundred years, easily; perhaps nine hundred years. When I was young, Walter Cronkite had always read the news, and either Pearson or Diefenbaker had always been Prime Minister.

And their views and acts and principles seemed grander and more meaningful as well: because each one was done or thought or met in existence for the first time.

It is in this light that I tend to read Genesis. The crime in Eden we all go through, we are all touched by original sin in that sense. It is inherent in the awakening of consciousness, or at least so far it has always happened: at some point as we feel our ego stir, we accept the notion that we ourselves might become God. We see the universe as centering upon us, not on any other.

Before this point, as children, we see all animals as our friends, and friends to one another. The stuffed lion lies next to the stuffed lamb. Our earth is a garden of wild flowers.

Then we think of ourselves as secretly great, and the shadows fall. And in them hide the monsters. Leviathan is under the bed; a flaming sword or something waits in the closet. And we, now being supremely ourselves and not a part of all, are suddenly all alone.

Those other things out there seek to devour us, and we can never trust them. We know this certainly, because we know we seek to devour them.