Invisible Forces

I woke up from a dream remembering something that happened several weeks ago. The dream was about our conceptions of beauty, peer pressure, and the influence of ideas about whiteness and blondness. It was about forces of nature. 

I was remembering an interaction with two girls in the Kindergarten classroom. They were sitting up straight, side by side at a low table with their elbows at near right angles to the pages in front of them. Their colored pencils were upright in their hands, and they were talking back and forth as they glanced at each other's drawings. Interested in what they were talking about, I knelt on the ground between their chairs. 

While her own hair is a lustrous black color cut in a pageboy style, the girl to my left had drawn a figure with long yellow hair, and a dress with a neatly ordered rainbow colored bodice together with a sky blue scarf to match the hem. She later told me that she was the figure in the drawing.

"Ok," I said. "So what are you two talking about?"

"We are talking. In Chinese." It was the first thing she ever said to me.

"I know that," I said, "But what do you mean? What is the meaning of what you are saying?"

A moment passed while I wondered what she understood about what I was asking. This was the first day of Kindergarten, and I had yet to discover this girl would be the first one of us to receive and give meaning to the language emerging from our bilingual, bicultural community of learners. 

The girl said, "We are talking. About beauty." Her finger rested beneath the elevated hem of the figure's sky blue scarf. She nodded at the girl sitting next to her: "And she says, that this, doesn't go up."

I observed what the other girl had pointed out and thought out loud, "Well what about the wind? If there was wind outside, that would make the scarf go up."

The girl’s hair moved ever so slightly as she turned to look at me. She looked back to the page, and with a deliberate hand drew a number of spiral symbols to denote the wind in the space between her figure and the top of the page.

We gained something in that moment.

Understanding is receiving what is offered, and adding perspective or possibility. What doesn't make sense or doesn't seem beautiful wants something invisible to make it whole. It isn't finished yet.