Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

In the paper this morning was a photo of a five year old boy pointing his finger at where he had spotted a ring tailed lemur. This lemur had been stolen from the zoo and had been let go in a nearby park, after the thief realized he was in big trouble (he was caught later). What I love about the photo is that the magic of seeing a lemur is blurred in a five year old, because their books tell them amazing wonderful things happen. He saw what others did not because of his openness to everything real or imagined. When my kids were children, we were driving in Rocky Mountain Park and our older son insisted he saw a flamingo. We whizzed by and my husband and I were delighted by his imagination. We told the story many times. But recently, our son said he researched and it was plausible and rational that there really was a flamingo there, on a migratory pathway and temporarily halted for a touch down. We will never know for sure, but his world was bigger and more open to whatever comes than his parents' world. We have eyes but do not see.