And the Question Came

It was bedtime last night and I was laying down between the boys. We were huddling under the blankets, slowly finding the bedtime rhythm of a late night. We began the familiar routine of question/answer/story as we worked through the day and then they asked : "Mommy, where did we come from?". I was startled but I also understood they were asking me Where We came from. Not the question of the womb or the home but the Question...

I didn't say God put us here because I don't believe that. I said I didn't know. I explained a bit about evolution and Earth and the Big Bang, about the Universe being so so large and about every beautiful thing that exists had some path, some place and evolution to make it so. But that I also didn't really know.

The conversation wove about, to volcanic action and back to the time of Dinosaurs and why they became extinct, or dead, as Mace will clarify every time. We talked of food and starvation and legs mired in tar (Mace's theory) and eventually the words slowed down, the bodies I lay between became more and more still and then their breath fell into that rhythm, the one that instantly makes me feel at one with them, at One.

I want them to ask that Question again and again. I want to explain about the miracle that Life is. In the simplest of ways; by showing them a shoot growing, or their lungs exchanging gases with that shoot, or the stars that spin through their own cosmic dance.

I will not be able to tell them that they were put here by the choice of some Other thing because I don't know about that. But I can tell them that they are Here. And I can tell them about what I do know. And about Love. That seems a very good start.



* Thinking of Susan, a brilliant star with a valiant warrior heart and a voice that spoke to hundreds, thousands, millions as she lived. She is missed on this day.