A Personal Parable
October 23, 2009
A Personal Parable
Last weekend North Carolina experienced it’s first days of cool, crisp, fall weather. After being pregnant through the summer humidity, I was ready to celebrate. My days of sitting on the couch beneath an air conditioning vent, as my five-year-old daughter Bella ran to fetch freeze pops at my hourly command, were over! Those embarrassing episodes of floating around our friend’s pool, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Violet Beauregarde after she’d chewed the gum that inflated her into a round wrecking ball with limbs—no more! My friend Kathy and I decided to honor these high holy days of bulky sweaters and cool breezes by taking the kids for a picnic at The Museum Park in Raleigh.
As we drove to the park I was overcome by the beauty of the day. A perfect blue sky, decorated with Michelangelo-esque clouds smiled upon us as we cruised down the highway. Bella was in the back seat singing lullabies to the baby as he giggled and cooed. Kathy and I were sitting side by side in the front seats, enjoying the cozy cocoon of friendship. This was going to be a great day.
When we arrived at the park, I found that my first order of business was to adjust my fantasy of strolling through the outdoors while leisurely taking in the sights and sounds of our surroundings. I hadn’t yet gotten the stroller out of the trunk when Bella, at the sight of an unbelievably sexy drainage pipe, took off on her imaginary horse, Silver Mist, to explore the “big tunnel.” I should have known. My Bella takes to the outdoor elements like a Retriever to a game of fetch. She sees wide-open space and starts salivating, rolling, jumping, skipping, cart wheeling and climbing anything dangerous or off limits. She’s always been this way. When she was eight months old, one morning Jeff and I heard an unusually loud thud that seemed to come from her bedroom. When we peeked in, there was our adorable baby, perched on all fours in the middle of her bedroom, looking like a puppy who had just escaped from his kennel for the first time. She seemed completely bewildered as to what she should do with her new found freedom. Our demure, little girl-child hadn’t learned to walk yet, but she’d already made a prison break.
After enticing Bella away from the drainage pipe, we found our way onto the main trail of the park. The Museum Park is truly a sight to behold. It spans 164 acres of wooded landscape punctuated by environmental artwork. The balance of natural and created beauty makes a special magic that is palpable. Bella was feeling it. She and Silver Mist bolted down a grassy hill and arrived at the first sculpture entitled Gyre. This is a mammoth work of three consecutive circles that are each 24 feet tall made from concrete and the red clay of the surrounding earth. The work is meant to evoke a sense of spiraling or gyration. If the actions of a five year old bear witness, than there is no denying the artist’s success on this one. Before Kathy and I were anywhere near the bottom of the hill, Bella was attempting to scale the mighty Gyre, despite all the signs that scolded NO CLIMBING! Thank God we were the only ones around. When we finally caught up to her, she had already climbed up and jumped down the side of Gyre many times and was now attempting to extract a chunk of cement off of it to keep as a souvenir. She has a thing for rocks, another trait that has been with her for some time. I don’t know if there was some spark to her obsession. I only can tell you that since she was about two she has taken great pride in gathering and gifting rocks. When we go to a park, Bella gathers rocks. When we go to a restaurant or any other venue with a parking lot, Bella gathers rocks. When we go outside in our grassy, mulched yard, Bella will dig until she discovers a rock. Often, after she has mined and polished her precious rocks, she gives them away to people as tokens of affection. When the gift of her lovely rock is met with a puzzled facial expression by the gifted, she appears dumbfounded. The beauty, and therefore value of a rock, is quite obvious to her. It’s not quite as obvious to her teacher at school. Last week when I picked her up from school she entered the car in tears, a first for her. The interesting thing with Bella is that as much as she can be a daredevil, for the most part, she is a rule follower. Her teacher once described her as “incredibly responsible.” Given the likes of Jeff and I, all I can say is that DNA is a bizarre thing. When I inquired as to what the matter was, her little face crumbled when she explained that her teacher made her put the rocks she had collected from the playground back onto the playground. She was both mad and sad. In her teacher’s defense, I will say that her collecting can get carried away. The week before when I had visited her classroom, I noticed her pretty dress had weirdly shaped bulges all over the front. I felt a little embarrassed, assuming the dress had most likely been retrieved from the dirty clothes that morning and I just hadn’t noticed. When I took a closer look, I saw that she had jimmied the fabric of her dress around several rocks creating satchels to carry them in. She doesn’t think twice about this strange impulse of hers, unfortunately for her, her teacher does. In an effort to be a responsible parent, I told her she needed to respect and therefore obey her teacher’s rules about rocks when she was at school, but that she could continue her collecting obsession on my watch. I thought the moral was pretty clear; respect your teacher by obeying his rules. She took away a different lesson. Last night at the dinner table, I was asking about her day—the usual questions, Who did you have lunch with? Who did you play with on the playground? To this last question, she grinned shyly and explained that she hadn’t played with anyone on the playground, but rather sat in a sunny spot to warm herself. This was a suspicious confession given her hyper-active tendencies in the outdoors. She then leaned in and whispered, “I snuck some rocks in my pockets. Don’t worry, my teacher didn’t catch me.” Maybe DNA isn’t as bizarre as I thought.
“Bella, you can’t take a chunk of that sculpture. That is someone’s artwork.” I said through slightly clenched teeth after we caught up with her. “But it’s so beautiful, I just want a little piece.” “No, absolutely not. Why don’t you and Silver Mist go explore that field over there and see if you can find some rocks that won’t entangle us in a law suit.” Off they went. As Kathy and I strolled the baby down the path in Bella’s general direction, we could see her bending over to pick wildflowers and of course, gather more rocks. She soon fell into a rhythm of gathering and dumping. She would fill her hands and pockets and then dump her findings into the stroller. The stroller quickly started to fill up with dandelions, wild strawberries, and hard clay pieces. In order to keep amassing her collection, she began adorning the baby, who was beginning to look like a bedraggled Christmas tree. “Bella, I think we should be done collecting stuff. There isn’t any room left. What do you plan on doing with all of this stuff anyway?” I said. “I don’t know. I just like collecting it. I’ll use it for something. Promise.” Right as these words fell out of her mouth we found ourselves standing in front of another massive art piece. And guess what, it was made entirely out of rocks. Bella, Kathy and I all stood silent. “See Mom, I could make a beautiful piece of art with my stuff.” What could I say?
We continued exploring the park. We followed dirt trails, scaled some more off-limit masterpieces and had a lovely picnic in the sun. By the time we were making our way back to the car, Bella had a walking stick, flowers in her hair, and rocks poking out of her pockets. The stroller resembled an unkempt bush with a baby face poking out of the middle. We were almost to the car when I noticed Bella and Kathy were hunched over in the grass looking at something. “Okay” I though to myself. “This has really gotten out of hand. I am done with holding onto all this useless crap.” Before I could command Bella to drop whatever it was she was holding, she came bounding over with a soft, brown caterpillar perched on her finger. Giggling with excitement, she proudly held “Fuzzy” up to my nose. “Look Mom. Isn’t it beautiful?! I was just walking along and there was Fuzzy, waiting for me. Awww, she’s so cute, can I keep her? Hey look we have everything we need to make a home for her. I’ll just use these rocks and flowers and put them in my lunch sack.” She was right. For the next few minutes we carefully assembled a home for Fuzzy using an array of dandelions, weeds and rocks from Bella’s unruly nature collection.
Later that day, Bella introduced Fuzzy to Jeff. He thought it would be fun to do some research and find out what kind of caterpillar Fuzzy was and what Fuzzy liked to eat. As Kathy and I were unpacking the lunches and cleaning off the stroller that now resembled Oscar the Grouch’s trash can, Jeff said “You’re not gonna believe this. Fuzzy is an Isabella (Bella’s given name) Tiger Moth. It says here she like rocks, dandelions and dirt.” Bella proudly exclaimed, “Perfect! I gathered just the right stuff. She was meant to be mine all along.”
As I reflect on this day, I believe that God was unveiling a parable just for me. “Learn from your daughter. She doesn’t labor or spin; she simply follows her true heart, no matter how quirky. She enjoys the journey and adventure of walking along the path and discovering. She finds herself well equipped to receive and care for whatever comes her way.”
I believe. Help my unbelief.
