- What are you looking for? Can I help?
- Just looking.
A handsome young man, maybe 3 years old, continued his task wandering the hightide line, picking up shells and wave-worn driftwood, examining, discarding - except for the few interesting treasures saved into his yellow plastic bucket.
What made a knotty piece of wood interesting, what distinguished one sand-carved shell from another was never explained. It was intuition alone. A list of criteria is an adult concept and entirely useless, superfluous, irrelevant.
Later, in the shade of a very old rata, he picked each treasure out and arranged it on the sand. He was clearly seeing values and beauty that tired eyes missed. Some pieces had lost the beauty of the beach and were touched once and left. But others still held their mystery or their clever shaping, and were picked up, shown to adults (who mostly missed their perfection of colour, form and craftsmanship, but still said the right words).
I noticed that my few contributions found their way to the lower levels of the arrangement.
What had he seen that more experienced eyes skipped over?
When do we stop seeing individual items and start to see collective nouns?
How can we regain our sense of wonder in the tiny marvels of creation?
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