Dreams for the Children

I was asked today, what is my dream for my child? Two things come to mind:

First, I want my daughter to fall in love with the Earth. And second I want to help teach my daughter to like people. To love humanity.
Risky I know. That first goal seems natural and tangible.
The first one feels like the heroine in me, heeding the clarion call. In some ways, it’s so easy to love the earth. There is so much beauty. There is so much mystery. I can feel the crowds nodding. Yes, we have to Save the Earth after all don’t we?
But to fall in love with humanity? This feels edgy. Unpopular. Not en vogue with the collective investment in cancel culture.
I want my daughter to be streetwise AND to believe that people are inherently good. I want to come back from the grocery store and remember there’s a toddler listening before I flippantly say, “God, people suck today.”

I’m not interested fostering naiveté. Falling in love with this earth didn’t happen because I loved rainbows and dolphins (which I did and do). That may have been the romance, but the real love came when I had to learn to love, appreciate, and honor rattlesnake. I had to learn to be with the darkness of the woods.

I’m not interested in teaching her if she just smiles, everyone will invite her over for a piece of pie and a high five. People are messy and often wounded. Collectively, we are going to be sorting through the PTSD of the pandemic, climate change, and global de-stabilization for the rest of our lives. We’re not going to Save this Earth by coming up with wittier ways to say “I hate everybody” (and, yeah, sometimes I say that).

Something else has to happen. That something else is relational. It’s remembering the longing for love behind every pair of eyes you meet. It’s choosing to affirm the inherent goodness in people, with eyes wide open, fully in the reality that people do hateful, selfish things. But people are also capable of great wonders. Of astounding beauty. Of unending mystery.

I’m interested in the monumental task of remembering that we are mythic beings, living through mythic times, with the ability to tell a different story than the one we’ve been selling each other.

I like you.