Monday, March 4, 2024

Mending Fences, Pt 2: Frost Heaves

[Part II: Frost Heaves, a Coda, if you will, to the February 23, 2024 post on the human costs of building walls.]
 

      It would be unfair to leave my parsing of "Mending Wall" (in my February 23rd post) without giving a bit more voice to a few elements that shed additional light on Robert Frost's thinking, his philosophical leanings, and his superb craftsmanship. The appearance of narrative and descriptive simplicity in "Mending Wall" is a Frost trademark; that is a primary reason we all find his poems so attractive. But that very simplicity embodies a more complex, nuanced set of attitudes and ideas. Frost as "frost heave" -- personal belief as 'force of nature' -- is just one example of Frost's layered technique.

    It's easy enough to note that "good fences make good neighbors." Often quoted, this sentiment is both a traditional cliche that smacks of medieval thinking and an unexamined home-grown proverb. We might think it is the notion we are expected to embrace because it is up-front, straightforward, and plain-spoken at the end of the poem. It is,  to use a modern figure of speech, the "take away."

    Well, yes and no. Noting Frost's low opinion of walls takes the idea one step further, the notion enhanced by his descriptive language regarding his stone-age neighbor who resolutely embraces the fence/good neighbor ideal. That was the gist of my last post.

 

    If we understand Frost's opposition to fences making good neighbors, we ought to be surprised by his, or the narrator's, participation in the annual ritual of rebuilding the wall. Since neither neighbor needs the wall for land or crop protection and since neither needs the wall as a repository for stones pulled from fields being prepared for crops, the exercise of setting tumbled rocks back onto the rock wall has no immediate agricultural, privacy, or security function. 

    Frost is right, the wall is not necessary between civilized people living next to each other. Civilized neighbors don't need walls.

    What the annual rebuilding of the stone walls does require, oddly enough, is cooperation, a willingness to compromise, and an understanding of working together. Good fences that bring us together to work in peace toward a common goal, shared labor, and maintaining a land feature that enhances both domains. In other words, it is an activity that benefits both while costing little more than a few hours, a bit of labor, some wear and tear on the hands, and a desire to keep the peace. 

     I won't push this notion far enough to suggest that Frost had Christian leanings, but I will argue that the narrator in "Mending Wall" was acting under the broadly understood Christian principle of "love your neighbor as yourself." 

 

    Frost's wall -- in this instance not a wall built out of fear nor out of a misplaced sense of political expedience -- constitutes a shared wall, restored for the common good through common labor and a spirit of good will. A wall meant to bridge, if you will, to unify rather than to divide. A wall that allows both neighbors to maintain their identities, even as they remain congenial with one another. Now that, I would argue, is an extraordinary example of how we might find common cause in an age characterized by rigidity, misplaced virtue, orchestrated fear, and, frankly, arrogance.

Friday, February 23, 2024

Building Walls, Mending Fences, Engaging Force Fields

                

        Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
        That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
        And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
        And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

      I am embarrassed to admit that I have not always understood the first lines of Robert Frost's familiar poem "Mending Wall" to embody a joke of sorts. After all, despite the initial general reference to "something," the poem does provide a number of plausible answers for the question "why walls tend to fall down?"  "Something" is not terribly useful in helping us understand what might be behind the "frozen-ground-swell[s]" that are responsible. But perhaps we'll find satisfactory explanation before the poem ends.

    "Mending Wall," of course, concerns free-standing stone fences erected years and years ago by New England farmers to clear their fields of rocks. Few things make plowing and planting as difficult as rocky soil. As a teenager during my summer job as farm labor, I spent many hours "picking rocks" out of fields that we had "harvested" rocks from just the summer before. We threw our potato sized rocks into the bucket of a front-end loader before dumping the bucket in piles just off the field.

    Today, we think of those walls built before our time as decorative rather than functional, so this poem, which dates from 1914, is instructional as to how farmers might have regarded their stone walls and the work needed to keep them in place. We can all grasp the practical solution of replacing stones that have fallen during the winter.

    Other cultures have used walls to achieve particular ends, often as fortification walls. We visited walls along the mountain tops above the Korean port of Busan, built in older times as a bulwark against invaders from the sea. Korea faced frequent attempts to invade their peninsula both from China via the mainland, and from Japan, among others, from the sea. The wall could be manned by soldiers or watchmen, ships could be identified as trading vessels or as foreign invaders before they reached the harbor, and signal fires could be lit to send an alarm quickly from watchtower to watchtower.

    Our word "fortification" is often code language for keeping the barbarians at bay. "Barbarian" itself is code for many other undesirable things beginning with "foreign," "alien," "other," "not us." While we don't always take this coded language further, what the words clearly imply are things like murder, rape, pillage, destruction, loss of what is ours. Those "protected" by the wall also see it as a means of securing identity and, perhaps, of controlling the population or regulating trade.

    It is easy to think here of some famous walls from antiquity built to serve these functions. Hadrian's Wall, which runs east and west across northern England, is one. Remnants of that wall are a special attraction these days, especially for those interested in Roman ruins. The Romans built great walls. And roadways. And baths. We might have ventured further north to see a part of Hadrian's Wall this last September while visiting in Chester -- had I not gotten sick. 

    The Great Wall of China, which dwarfs Hadrian's Wall in every way, is another famous "security" wall of ancient construction. We have not seen the Great Wall on our visits to China, but we were able to walk along side of a small scale-model of that wall at an outdoor theme park in Shenzhen called "Splendid China." This miniature was built with meticulous care and precision.

    It's not the same experience, of course; but with a little imagination one can get a feel for what the Great Wall entails. The actual Great Wall is visible from space, after all. In addition to the usual reasons regarding barbarians, the Great Wall was also built as a way of hemming in various tribal and ethnic regions to create one "unified" China. The "one China" effort we see today has ancient roots in Chinese history. What struck me in visiting this scale model -- and what has struck me in other places we have visited with architectural and artistic "ruins" -- was the cost of these projects in terms of human lives.

    These costs are not part of the PR associated with the tourist experience but one can easily find educated estimates of lives lost during construction. In a quick check regarding number of deaths attributed to building the Great Wall, I kept finding 400,000 popping up in numerous sources, although, of course, it is impossible to get a finely calibrated death toll.

    Although they are not walls, many of the famous ancient monuments we saw in Egypt or the fairly recently discovered clay soldier excavations at Xi'an, China, are testament not just to human ingenuity and engineering brilliance, but also to servitude, suffering, and loss of life. It would seem to be a human tendency to look away from human costs in favor of the bright and impressive objects.


    The human cost of building, maintaining, and staffing walls with soldiers, watchmen, messengers, trades people and suppliers of all sorts has always proven enormous -- even when the construction itself performs as intended, which, I would argue, is rarely the case. At least they do not appear to perform well for long. "Something there is that doesn't love a wall."

    Another trait many of these walls and ruins share with each other is that they were constructed under authoritarian rule. There may be rare exceptions to this generalization, but I don't know of too many. Even the "necessary" wall above Busan was likely built with conscripted labor. The lives of those pressed into labor were not often much different from the day-to-day lives of those who lived within the wall's protection except for the shortened life-expectancy of laborers. This fact in itself would suggest a causal rather than a coincidental link between authoritarianism and the compulsion to build walls.

    In recent years, perhaps because we know more about them, barrier walls have a rather more complicated track record. The "wall of separation" put up by Israel in the West Bank to hinder Palestinian suicide attacks seems to have worked for that specific problem; the wall of separation has, in fact, seriously reduced the number of suicide bombers. And we know that Israel operates as a democracy not an autocracy, although the wall has been controversial.

    Still, one would be remiss to regard even this wall as a permanent solution because one consequence of the wall is that Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis are no longer able to know each other. The wall sunders daily interactions; it negates community. Citizens on both sides of the wall no longer know each other well. This actualized appeal to separation leads to ignorance, ignorance to suspicion, suspicion to falsehood and fear, fear to grievance, violence, and calls for vengeance. 


     Think October 7th at the southern border as, perhaps, an unintended consequence.

    Other "security" walls built within my lifetime would include the Berlin wall. A particularly notorious part of the "iron curtain," the Berlin Wall was an attempt to keep some Germans out of East Berlin and other Germans in. The Berlin wall was famously opposed by American Presidents of both parties, namely, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. This wall, built of cinder block, topped with razor wire, and bordered by kill zones, was simply a hard manifestation of the hard borders we associate with the Soviet Union. Same intentions, same functions, same infliction of lethal punishment on those within and without who dared cross it.

    If you are thinking that the iron curtain also has more than a passing resemblance to the much-called-for tall steel border wall along the Rio Grande, you are right. Envisioned by some as "security" for those of us privileged enough to live north of our southern border, it can have a visceral appeal. Thinking that such a wall will protect us, however, is simply wrong. Protection is not that singular nor that simple. The problems that need fixing are much larger and more complex than "great wall" can accommodate. 

    "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," the poet wrote. I understand the poem, mostly, but I missed the joke. More recently, I got it. The joke. The statement. The alignment. The "frost" pun as personal statement. The joke in those lines is that the "Something" is "frost," as in Frost himself, a force of enlightened thinking and a force of Nature. It's not really funny, but it is telling.

    If you are in doubt as to the force of the narrative, you might find it illuminating to read the end of "Mending Wall," noting especially how Frost characterizes the neighbor who keeps insisting that the wall be rebuilt every spring.                                       

                                            I see him there 
        Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
        In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
        He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
        Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
        He will not go behind his fathers saying,
        And he likes having thought of it so well
        He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Saturday, February 3, 2024

After all, it's a small world

    We did not visit the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) along the 38th Parallel during our five months in Korea in 2011, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that tours were taking tourists far enough north to "see" into North Korea. We had opportunities, I suppose; several times we traveled to Seoul from our community in Busan on the KTX. We might have ventured further, but neither of us felt lured by the opportunity to view forbidden land to the north. And the idea that a buffer zone between warring countries could be viewed as a form of entertainment was unsettling.


    Busan, where we were living in a graduate student dorm, lies within the Pusan Perimeter, which was the small corner of the Korean Peninsula around the port of Pusan not overrun by the North during the 1950-53 hot war. Among other things, Busan (then Pusan) was the seat of the ROK Provisional Government, backed by the UN. The government returned to Seoul once it was following General Douglas McArthur's famously risky and famously successful sea landing at Incheon. That was September 15, 1950.


 

     During our all-too-brief residence in Korea, our interest both in my teaching assignment and with our living situation was to live and work among Koreans. This meant, of course, that we were able to see, hear, and rub shoulders with more Koreans -- to be Korean as much as possible. We had specifically requested we not be put in an American compound.

    We were only in country about five months, but our observations during that time confirmed over and over that during the 1950-53 war in Korea everyone suffered. Even those who never left Pusan or who had fled to the relatively protected area around Pusan itself suffered unimaginably.

    It is interesting to me that all the stories I have read about that period, especially those written by Koreans, speak to the overwhelming fear, deprivation, uncertainty, unnecessary loss of life, and stress all Koreans experienced. My first Korean "war novel" was Wan-Suh Park's Who Ate Up all the Shinga? While"shinga" a "survival food" (think, perhaps, dandelion greens) that ordinary people might forage, Park's novel describes the unrelenting horrors and losses experienced by one family, caught as they were between armies from the North and armies from the South. It is a heartbreaking read.

    The Korean University students I taught were unwilling on the whole to write about this period of war. Many had been shielded from its horrors to the point of ignorance; most just wanted to leave the past alone. I understand that reluctance. Nevertheless, some were forthcoming when asked to describe their grandparents' lives, especially in terms of how grandparents' lives differed from their own. I can't begin to catalog the varieties of hardship, violence, oppression, deprivation, and suffering that surfaced in these stories. In some cases the grandparents had long ago gone silent, taking their horrors with them. 

    I have no personal experience that even remotely compares, yet my heart was and is battered over and over again. How could it not be so?

    Other countries I have lived in or visited -- China, Russia, Egypt, France, the UK, even my own country, the US -- bear the scars of war in visible ways. I have visited battlefields and memorials. I have read accounts. I have seen photographs. I have friends whose lives have been damaged by combat in wars during my own lifetime. I have pieced together comments and observations from many sources. Sometimes there is chest-thumping and the self-congratulation.  Official histories can read that way; the old adage that victors write the histories is true enough. Sometimes, the accounts call for vengeance; they-did-it-first finger-pointing, calls for retaliation and retribution frequently underlay these arguments instead of clear-eyed reasoning. Truth-telling, capital "T" Truth, is usually a first casualty.

    While it may be true that some few wars are actually necessary, the UN defense of South Korea being one perhaps, no war is a good war, a clean war. We visited the UN Cemetery in Busan while we were there. Twice, in fact. It had the same sobering, heart-wrenching effect on me as our visit to the American Cemetery in Normandy in October 2018.


 

 

 

    Objectively, all wars produce a common set of facts: soldiers die, civilians die, babies and old people die, cities are destroyed, lives are ruined, traditions and ways of life are obliterated, farmland is rendered toxic with landmines and other residue from the war effort. And everyone, civilians especially, pays an extraordinary price in suffering.

    All of my observations lead me to this question: If war is so universally reprehensible and its punishments so widely catastrophic, why is the alternative, peace, such a hard idea to grasp? 

    This is not a moment for finger pointing nor for posturing -- neither will bring an end to killing and suffering. To state it differently, does it really surprise anyone that the current war in the middle east is intractable if the starting point for both sides is annihilation of the other? The same question can be asked of other violent conflicts, as even partisans should know. Surely, there is enough blame to go around to account for the present state of our troubled world. None of us can claim absolutely to have clean hands.  

    Isn't our troubled world the same world mentioned in the first phrase of John 3:16 -- this world that God loved so, so much that he intervened in human history? Why is it so hard to understand that strength, power -- whatever its forms -- comes with enormous responsibilities? Or that peace require we step into the breach, as it were -- that we become agents of peace?

    Why do we find it easier to build bunkers and shroud them with barbed wire to protect our "security" than to put on kindness, generosity, compassion, understanding -- to allow ourselves to be vulnerable for the sake of the common good? Why do we frame our positions in terms of abstractions and absolutes, ensuring war remains inevitable and intractable?

    For those of us who identify as Christian: why do we insist on practicing our faith selectively? Why do we pick and choose from Scripture what seems to support our position, especially in the political arena, and ignore the weightier matters of mercy and justice and faithfulness? Why are we so quick to draw an absolute line between I and we? between us and them? 

    Unless we value ceremonies in the military cemeteries over lives of preventable suffering in our own time, we need to take responsibility. We who so eagerly and quickly embrace grace for ourselves are called out when we cruelly deny it to others. If we excuse that behavior, shame on us. Shame on me. Shame on you. Shame on all of us.

  

Thursday, January 11, 2024

A New Year's Tale

 

So it was
on that long journey into childhood,
when few moments had accumulated
in Memory and fewer still as Family History,

before special days became Traditions,
the first Christmas I remember 
began in a snowdrift east of Cheyenne.
My father's truck stuck fast near the cattle gate

at the turn-in
to one straight mile of dirt road
leading to my grandfather's church
and the four room parsonage

miles from any ranch house.
Already bundled for cold, my brothers and I
pushed back the canvas door of Dad's homemade canopy,
climbed out of the truck bed to breathe air

untainted by exhaust. 
We leaned against the wind-driven snow,
scarves tightened over our noses, and
headed down the road toward parsonage lights

my parents assured us
they could see -- a family of pilgrims,
refugees, seekers of safe harbor in the storm -- 
Dad, Mom, the youngest brother carried,

we three older boys
-- all huddling as much as trudging allowed in a blizzard
-- all hoping the lantern in the truck bed would burn
long enough to save the television

with its huge cabinet, to keep
its tubes, its tiny screen from freezing in the arctic night.
And then we were welcomed in,
warming under blankets on the living room floor.

And the small blue pilot light of the gas furnace
that was the star of our arrival
became morning sun,
and my father and grandfather

were settling the television console into a corner,
our truck miraculously in the yard,
the night journey already lost
to the harrowing snows of yesterday.

And I sat up in my travel clothes to air 
full of women's voices and festive cooking in the kitchen.
And then it was, as it would be always from that day,
a real Christmas and the promised New Year.
 

 

Thursday, December 28, 2023

A Christmas List

     Once upon a time, lists were a different thing. My mom always kept a grocery list, of course, but I am referring to a different kind of list. During my long ago childhood, which is to say, during the 1950s, I might have been asked what I wanted for Christmas. It was an adult question of the "what do you want to be when you grow up" sort. I just don't remember being asked. And a child who drew up a list 'for Santa' was a bit of a dreamer, at least in our house.

    Still, one year I received an ill-fitting football uniform that I must have begged desperately for. I may have worn the uniform once or twice for the front yard tackle football games we played, my brothers and I and neighborhood boys. Another year I got cowboy boots -- we lived in Wyoming, after all, within earshot of the stadium where Josh Allen played quarterback for Wyoming Cowboys many decades later. I liked the cowboy boots and wore them, although clearly I would have wanted higher heels rather than the flat boots my parents chose.

    "Wish Lists," "bucket lists," and on-line "registries" were far in the future. When I was growing up, grown-ups mostly thought in terms of "what does he need?" At least if one judges by the presents themselves -- socks, pajamas, 3-in-a-pack tidy whities, a white shirt for Sunday -- need  is what pulled the Christmas gift wagon. 

    So, back in the day, as we say now, when I was a young man with a young family and a new career as a teacher and maybe also great literary ambitions -- at a time when I could, in fact, and sometimes did burn the candle at both ends -- I wrote a poem called "Christmas List." Like the poem in my Christmas post, this poem has one foot on the stony path of every day life; but most of the weight here is on the other foot, the one treading the larger realm of universals.

    I won't assume, dear reader, that you need to have the poem explained. Nevertheless, on the other side of the poem I will point out things that might shed light on my 'list'.

 

Christmas List

 

A knife for salvation

A book for its doors


A voice or a fence for freedom

    either will do

Mice for comfort


A clock for anxiety

A pen, a pen to live by


Hands to shape the air

Window casings to sing in the freshening wind


A moment, a chair

& light


Yes, a little circle of light


    Odd as it may appear on first reading, this poem is special to me. It does a lot of work, one might say. As the last poem in Simple Clutter  it brings a note of redemption to a book that grows dark near its end, not all that different from the dark days of December at year's end. "Light" is the last word of this last poem; "a little circle of light" is the last, and "telling," phrase. The real life bones of the book -- its skeleton, if you will -- "a book," "a voice," "a pen," "a moment," "a chair/ & light" -- are my tools; they are what a writer needs to work. 

    This noting of 'bones' references my own daily occupation with writing, but it is hardly a stretch to identify them as devotion as well. "A clock," which for the writer is also both time for the task at hand and a deadline, may also be one of those bones. Setting aside the "knife" and "mice' references for a broader discussion, the other, less direct elements might be understood as constraints, obstacles, limitations, and maybe inspiration, or even as process.

    We are working in the margins here, I know. But let the ideas sink in for a moment; poems are inherently an argument to slow down and to pay attention. The last line, already mentioned as providing a note of redemption is more than just the light that drops from a small work lamp onto a page one is laboring over. It is more than habitual acts of devotion. One might also think of it as illumination, insight, which appears to push aside the darkness that so quickly and easily characterizes our lives.

    If we follow out these ideas, as I am hoping we will, the poem as a "list" of what is hoped for constitutes a prayer for the handful of things necessary to enable the many layered life one, me in particular, may desire. These are not the cowboy boots with the low heels or the ill-fitting uniform that somehow appeared on my childhood "wish list," had I known such a thing.


 

    Though of far less magnitude, the possibilities of the last phrase are akin to the request Solomon of God to grant him wisdom -- not inspiration, not command, not integrity, not recognition, not imagination, however much these things might follow. But insight."Wisdom," being translated, is first recognition, followed by deep understanding, then knowing what to say or to do, then as required by acting wisely.

    "Yes, a little circle of light." Just imagine. That would be no small thing for God to grant us at Christmas. Or for the New Year.

    Or at any time.

Monday, December 25, 2023

Early on a Morning Near Christmas

     A decade or more before the turn of the millennium, we were living in an old farmhouse on a hillside above the village where I had recently begun teaching at a small college. The house faced hills to the east and the village lay below us along the river in the valley. My wife was in the ninth month of pregnancy, our child due somewhere around Christmas.

 

    Our close neighbor, living in another old farmhouse no more that one hundred feet away, was also expecting near the end of December. It was a great joy for both women to share that season of pregnancy as good and comfortable friends. 

    I have lost some of the precise details of this story in the years since. But what I know with certainty is that our neighbors' son arrived just ahead of Christmas day, while our son delayed well into January. When we heard our neighbors' news from the father, Paul, I began to reflect -- or "ponder," as we are told Mary did -- on all things related to the birth of a child into our world in this season of short days and continuing cold. 


    What did it mean, such a unique, yet completely common, human experience? I imagined Paul coming home from the hospital in the wee dark hours of that December morning when all the people he might rush to tell were still asleep. As is my habit, I wrote out of that moment -- which survives here in this poem, "News of Your Son."

News of Your Son


A tiny star 

in the black wilderness 

of a winter morning, 

the air like iron.


Wind has ceased,

boots crunch in the snow.


The horses, still shadows;

houses on streets below 

the pasture 

closed down, like sleeping faces.

Slow smoke of banked fires.


Now you on this errand                                                      

at this hour

in this deadly air 

in the pit of winter, 

looking for someone 

to share your joy at this news . . .


    The question is, "how might one announce such a singularly joyous event to a world that considers such things commonplace?" Or, we could ask "why detail a personal event as if it were a moment of universal consequence?" Christmas was on my mind -- but why run the two stories together?

    The best answer I can give is that each child is born defenseless, through a woman's travail. Yet from that moment of water and blood, a child is born with eternity in his or her heart. 


 

    That observation might be made of every good poem as well. So, a poem about our neighbor resonates with the Bible account of the Incarnation. It is true, brothers and sisters, that we walk with one foot on the stony path and the one foot on an eternal one. Today we are newly reminded of our condition. This is the day of God's favor. May we always count it so.     



["News of Your Son" published in Simple Clutter, 1998 by Mellen Press & 2018 by Wipf & Stock]

Wednesday, September 27, 2023

For the Love of Little People

    The morning after we arrived in London we were sitting at a sidewalk table at the Cafe Paradiso near the upper end of High Street, Chiswick, when I heard a familiar voice. "Dah-ddy," the little voice said in clear, round tones, "May I press the but-ton?"

    I have seen enough episodes of "Peppa Pig" with my young grandsons to know that voice anywhere! I turned around, not really expecting to see Peppa, but delighted to know that somewhere little girls really do talk like that. There was a tiny girl with a backpack and a bicycle helmet standing on a small, three-wheel scooter. When the traffic stopped and the green "walk" figure popped onto the screen, Daddy pulled her across the street with a tether attached to the front of her scooter.

     Among the subjects that capture my interest anywhere I travel are the little people who are busy being little people. It has happened everywhere I have traveled. When I have my camera in hand -- with permission when parents are nearby -- I take photographs of little people being themselves.

    What I find most compelling about little people engaged in play are two characteristics: one is their lack of self-consciousness as they go about the serious business of imagining, often playing alone with toys and sometimes interacting in groups. The second characteristic I find compelling is how similar young children act across the variety of cultures. Young minds are young minds are young minds. And before they have been pulled into attitudes and behaviors that dominate the adult world, they simple do what they want to do and regard the person with the camera -- if they notice at all -- with openness and curiosity.


    I began to include children among the "interests" I stop to photograph during our stay in Korea and China in 2011. The little boy in black (above) was playing in the ruins of an abandoned Hakka village. Prior to visiting the village with our Chinese hosts, I was unaware of this Han-Chinese subgroup. The ruins were interesting in themselves, but the little boy was fascinating. His improvised toys were sticks and some green plants. He was totally absorbed in his play and absolutely unfazed by the arrival of a carload of folks who wanted to walk through the old buildings. When we finished our short tour and came back to our car, he was gone. He had been playing by himself, the only local person we encountered there.

     Some months prior to that visit to China we spotted this little boy in Korea.

    What caught my eye about the Korean boy was his elaborate hanbok (traditional Korean attire). We encountered him as we were touring an area of Seoul with Chloe, one of our Korean home-stay daughters. I wanted a photograph, so I held up my camera to his parents, also dressed in hanbok, and pointed to the boy. They seemed more than pleased that I would take an interest. The boy and his family were celebrating his first birthday, which is traditionally an important occasion in a country with an historically high infant mortality rate.


 
    As we might imagine, dispassionate observation can teach us a great deal about a culture; watching young children may be one of the most revealing. It was also in Korea that we frequently witnessed very young school children traveling in pairs and columns led by teachers and helpers. The sense of  community responsibility and self-discipline begins early in Korea.

    Of course, little people share many characteristics that transcend cultural boundaries, such as we see with this little boy driving his toy vehicle through a puddle. The fact that the puddle is on a public thoroughfare makes no difference to him; he was as oblivious to foot traffic nearby as the little boy playing with sticks in my first photograph was oblivious to our carload of chatting visitors.


    Where there are no sticks or cars or puddles, a little person can find delight in whatever-is-there. This little girl, just one of our Asian "grandchildren," is turning her world upside down for the sheer joy of it.

    Or this little girl who, enchanted by this erhu player in Shenzhen, has moved as close to the music as she can. Spotting her the moment we passed by was a real gift to me. The photograph makes me smile every time I see it. I love her total lack of self-consciousness. There is a kind of deeply human magic here.


    All of these experiences, of course, remind me of my own children and my own grandchildren, the ways they have of exploring and the delight evident in their straightforward adventures. Much of this natural curiosity and openness eventually becomes complicated and outgrown, and too often this natural playfulness gets blunted, overtaken by other pressures. But for a while it is affirming to see that at some early point we are all, as humans, compelled by the same joy in life.


    Perhaps it is just the grandfather in me, but I love the way nearly every episode of "Peppa Pig" ends with the whole family falling to the ground laughing! I wonder whether Jesus had some of this open sharing in mind when he admonished his disciples to bring the little children to him. We often think of that New Testament story in narrow terms of "simple faith," which surely it is. But it might well be that his intention went well beyond that singularity to that openness to life and to others he offers us. For of such is the kingdom of heaven.