Our teachers can be found everywhere if we pay attention.

Recently, I had a spontaneous visitor who, like spring, is bursting with life.

He came to my home with no agenda.  But as is often the case when he visits, he inspired my awe.

My visitor was two and half year old, Elouin Crow.  My grandson.  He woke that morning as he often does with a very strong desire to “go Amani’s houz.”  And so, with assistance, Elouin called me on his family’s landline and asked if he could come.  Pretty irresistible, to say the least.

But before continuing…

Ever since I was child, I had a very strong feeling, a knowing actually, that grown-ups had forgotten a lot about what it’s like to be a child.  For example: forgetting that kids don’t like to be bossed around by grown-ups. Or that it’s hard to wait to learn to read.  And how hard and disgusting it is to swallow boiled spinach (just to name a few things the grown-ups did not remember).

I tried to explain this to my parents.  But the stronger my pointing out what seemed to me great injustices, the more my parents reverted to the bottom line: children should be seen and not heard.   

I knew that listening to children was extremely important—listening not just to their words and what they say, but to their while selves, which means paying attention.

Back to my visitor…

To say that Elouin teaches me to be present is a vast understatement. . 

During Elouin’s visit, we send Matchbox cars down bright orange rubber tracks, discover which cars race faster than others, watch them crash and flip.  Ready get set go (pronounced in a way I cannot transliterate) is repeated again and again and again enthusiastically, as if it’s the first time each time.  After the cars, we roll marbles down the tracks.  Then with a mischievous look on his face—like a little scientist trying an experiment he knows will not work—Elouin brings two square rubber blocks, accompanied by Ready get set go, then plop.

From racing cars, we head to the kitchen to make a “moothie.”  Standing on his stool, Elouin names and adds each of the ingredients with great care and intent.  The stash of tiny frozen wild blueberries set aside to be eaten not blended make his fingers and tongue blue.  At the table: many moothie mustaches.  Eating “opono” (oatmeal) with honey.

After the last bite of opono, the plan to go outside changes into “I have a bath.”  Doesn’t matter that it’s 11 in the morning.  Just as long as the water is “not too deep” and “not too hot,” the bath is the place to be. Not to wash up.  To blow bubbles.

And blow bubbles we do–well, I do.  (Elouin, finding it hard to make bubbles by blowing through the small opening in his bubble wand, has tossed his wand out of the tub, deferring to my bubble blowing skills.)

You might think all this was boring.

Oh no.  I was not bored.  I was enthralled. 

I wasn’t even slightly anxious about the work I was not getting done.   I had decided upon my YES to Elouin’s call, that my visit with this child, this miracle of life, was the most important thing— just like the big bubble landing on rubber Ernie, floating belly up in the tub, is the most important thing—the only thing. 

Elouin reminds me how it is to live that way.  Like this is the only thing.

This.  Now, this…  

Instructions for Living Life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

~Mary Oliver

Your homework aka mission, dear reader, should you choose to accept it:

pay attention,
be astonished,
tell about it.
(even if your telling is in your  journal).

💜
With love,
Ani aka Amani & Elouin Crow