Awe

Picture yourself in a boat on a river,
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly,
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes.

                      --John Lennon & Paul McCartney “Lucy in The Sky with Diamonds.”

                                                                                                 The Yellow Submarine

 “Why can’t I write something like that?” I commented to Darling Daughter on a recent trip to Las Vegas.

 “I think,” she said, “they were taking something mind-altering.”

 I think it was more like talent, and skill and ability and courage and perseverance. I heard that Lennon’s inspiration came from his son Julian when he was in nursery school. When John arrived to pick up his son, Julian was painting. John asked him what it was. “Lucy in the sky with diamonds,” he said. 

When Daughter Number One was three years old we went on her first camping trip. I still remember that feeling of walking barefooted down a newly graded dirt road with the soil cool and sensuous beneath our feet. We stopped at an outlook. My daughter spread wide her arms and stood there looking out over the expanse of forest and the immensity of the sky, “The sky is so big,” she said. “It is bigger than anything…except my smile when I’m proud.”

I stopped spellbound.

Baby Darling at two years old, outside at dusk, observed the moon glowing behind the branches of the tree, and created his own poem—awe strikes at an early age. “The tree makes a net for the moon,” he observed.

 I thought about these events the other night as I watched the evening sun go down. The glow hung orange on the horizon for an eternity, and I imagined hearing a clinking and grinding of giant pulleys and gears as they drove this earth-ball through space, but all was silent. I felt such appreciation for the continual turning of the earth, and realized how fragile we are, and how much we need our planet to be gentle with us, and it is.