I had just filled the washing machine with a load of laundry when six-year-old Tess tapped my back.
“Gummy, I’m confused.”
I waited for her to finish her sentence, but she didn’t.
“What are you confused about?”
“Why is it tree?” she asked.
“Why is what tree?”
She looked into the space to the side of us, searching for something that I guess wasn’t there.
“Why do they call it tree?”
I scanned the room looking for something that might resemble a tree.
“I don’t see a tree, Tess.”
“No,” she went on, “why do they call a tree a tree? I mean, who made up that word? Who made up all the words anyway? There must have been a time when there was a tree without a word to name it. Who gave it that name?”
I don’t know the answer to that, Tessy. But I can tell you I have had the same kind of questions. I’m sure there is an answer somewhere, in some realm unavailable to us.
Tess feels like the me I used to know. I get her. I delight in her and ache for her at the same time. There are just so many unanswerable questions. But it feels really validating that someone else has the same unanswerable questions as you. And I have had enough experience to believe that, while I can’t give her an answer, I can sit in the question with her, our knees curled up to our chests, our hands wrapped around our bony shins, planted on the porch of humanness together in silence, or bouncing related questions back and forth to each other until we are both satisfied that we have properly addressed the universe and now we can move on to playing something else.
Sometimes the best thing we can do for each other is be contentedly confused together.
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| After you're done being confused you find a set of butterfly wings and pretend. |
Perhaps on can conjecture that if Adam named the animals, then perhaps the beautiful aspects of our environment were given their names by Heavenly Mother….while I wouldn’t pass this off as doctrine it would definitely make logical sense.
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