The Paper

“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.”

– Thich Nhat Hanh

My eldest was showing me her social media memory for today of a video of her eldest at around 2 years of age actively painting on his arm. In the clip you can hear mom telling her son, paint on the paper. This was followed by the toddler briefly taking the brush and touching it to the paper on the floor, then smiling broadly and painting his arm again.

He would hold his arm out proudly to her and say PAPER! You could hear mom giggle off screen and say … “Nooooooooo that’s your arm. Paint on the paper.” This goes on for the next eighty seconds of the clip and my guess is it went on much longer both before and after Dad captured the moment on his cell phone.

My daughter showed me the video to comment how her son’s humor was indeed developing at a very early age. And it’s true, my grandson takes great pride in telling you an “obvious” wrong answer to a posed question. He delivers with a deadpan one-liner, followed by a shake of his head that same sly smile and the words Nooooooo followed by the correct answer (in some cases, though it’s equally as probable that it will become a shaggy dog story making you almost doubt that he knows the correct answer which is always a false assumption to make because the odds are it’s a math laugh he’s going for and this four year old knows numbers and math properties better than my aging brain can recite.)

Even though these traits may be part of my grandson’s DNA demeanor, there is no doubt in my mind that he would not be Shakespeare’s Puck if it was not for his mother’s ability to see the humor in his terrible twos and respond to what some parents would see as defiance and literally smack that smirk off of their face. You see what I mean? She said draw on the paper. His two year old brain drew on his arm and held it out and declared it was paper! He knew it wasn’t of course, he was already reading and doing rote math problems. But he was being funny. And she welcomed his creative expression and interpreted it as humor. The result is, the two of them get to enjoy each other much more of the time than what we are taught to expect from our parental dynamics.

We all know the stories about spare the rod, spoil the child. In each generation we tell the old wives tale a bit differently. We get so fixated on curing everything that makes us unique or different that we don’t even realize that organizations like Autism Speaks could actually be damaging to the gifts that neurodiverse people come prepared to share with the world.

We are taught that we each need to mold and teach our children to fit in at school. They must fit in the tiny right handed chairs, sitting still and silent for hours at a time in order to become a meaningful member of our essential worker society. Our language that defines something as a birth defect speaks volumes about how rigid we are in our ability to allow for the natural variance among all gods’ creatures.

We are reminded by the divide and conquer us versus them iteration on a theme that they can not be trusted and we are quick to condemn or condone based on the illusion of our pack mentality.

Rarely do we realize the insight of Interbeing. The reality that each of us are connected in ways our egoic mind rarely lets us glimpse for longer than a shooting star can light up the sky. We are so attached to our separate lives and a need to cut out the same shape cookie each and every time, so that it fits into grandma’s cookie jar without stopping to think if we really need to work so hard to fit in.

But when we do, either allow this sui generis to blossom in our own being or we extend grace and loving kindness to another person in order for them to shine in the glittering light of all that could be … we become the poet.