NEW CULTURES, OLD CULTURES

Watching the baby twins navigate this big strange unwalled world with its leaves and stones and sky; its insects, big people, clouds and machines; its trees, houses, animals and roads, all nameless as yet, though taste-able and incomprehensibly strange, the twins looking at it all, grasping, hefting, taste-testing what they can with complete fascination, as that is their only function at the moment, apart from figuring out how fingers work.

Watching them I realize that when we're born out of the warm and peaceful, dimly lit watery culture we've lived in all our lives, we're abruptly and choicelessly born into another completely disparate culture, to which we have to start adapting right away, a culture of beings that drink water and bathe in water, a culture in which water falls from the sky, but whose denizens move freely about in air as though it were water. How strange it all must be...

Yesterday Miasa sat on a blanket in the shade by the beach and spent her life time pulling apart yomogi leaves (as fast as I could get them for her) with all the focused intent of a currency trader. She was delighting in it, however, in her own cosmically personal way: the fragrance of it, the place of it, the texture, the feel and power and focus of it, so new herself that all else is new, no matter how old. Watching her, I felt that newness I used to feel as completely as she and her sister do now, before I learned all the names for things and how to move about in the new culture, not to go too near the water...

Children and grandchildren make us new, again and again.

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