It began the year that you became a father, the year of your transformation. In those months following the birth of your first child, your son, the chaff of accumulated living was burned away, and those things you had believed with more and more conviction to be True, became in the end only ideas you thought were true, mere thoughts you wore like styles of clothes, which now were worn out, out of fashion, out of season, useful only to dress yourself in nostalgia… in those few moments you found time to indulge in nostalgia.

For everything was poised toward the future, and the infant you held in your arms all night long — not against the pains of colic but to throw your arms around with warmth as if to soften those pains — was soon the toddler whose strengthening legs took a half-dozen first steps inclined from one holding parent to another receiving one; and the child who rode his plastic three-wheeler along the sandy trail in the park, who didn't even look behind for certainty that should he turn around, he would find you there, who kept his eyes to the front, intention riveted on keeping his small body moving in a straight line, was soon the school-child off to find friends and his own experiences in primary school.

You watch; you listen; you touch; you share; you instruct; you learn; you wait; you wonder; you fear; you hope; you smile.

You watch well enough, you listen well enough, and his skills or her skills become apparent. Some of them along paths you have worn well with travel, and you can reach back or call back and help your child along. Oh, they move so quickly, when they do not have to relearn everything for themselves, but can use your body and your history as a springboard to greater heights. Perhaps your child will be more gifted than you in some area; perhaps in many. What pleasure there is to see a gift greater than yours rise to the heights it deserves to attain, to catch higher currents of air, and sail away to a land you never could have known!

That strength is beauty. And channeling the real Light of creation, your child, any child, is freed to greater purpose and joy, greater beauty, greater wisdom… there: a new has spirit come into the world to lift us all up. That is only delight!

Then there are times when your child stumbles, or cannot see something you can see, or becomes lost as you have become lost so many times before. Maybe then you have a word to help in navigation, or a hand to get up again, or only the ability to brush off the dust… or only the ability to watch in impotence while your child's life plays out as it will. And you see it, you know it, you lived it yourself, but there is absolutely nothing you can do that you haven't already done. Nothing to do but breathe, and do your best to remain in your own body and life, while this other body and life runs into something hard and painful.

But most interesting to me is not what we are able to see. We have lived so long, we have walked and run through so much in our days, we believe we know so much, so much we know, that our knowledge gets in the way of our Knowing. Almost, the eyes have seen so much that the afterimages are graven onto the optic nerve, and new sights and lights arrive at senses already predetermined with what they are going to see. This is where a child helps us remain young, return to a newfound flexibility of thought and belief, if we are able.

Most interesting is to know, to know deeply by looking in all sorts of other directions, that the life which exists within the body and psyche of your child is in many ways understood, and in many ways completely beyond you. Because you live in a box. You live in a box of your own creation, pasted together by all of your experiences and your responses to those experiences, by the elaborate cosmology you have painted, connecting the dots from day to day to day until the constellation of moments which has been your life has been given a meaning which is difficult to change. Those stars: do they not form a Great Bear? Or the Hunter?

Because every human lives in deep communion, but is conscious only of the surfaces, there will be something new that has been born into your child which you cannot fathom. You will respond to his or her actions from your fixed beliefs, and cross the child's path at a tangent which finds no sense and makes no impression.

There it is, the great call of those who walk the well-lit path: "Who are you?" they ask, and you must answer. When the question has echoed well in the confines of your own thoughts, may they leak out a bit, lose their focus, and you lose the surety you have gained over days and months and years… look at your child. Don't speak. Listen, and ask: "Who are you?" Maybe you will learn something.