Thumbelina...

Who can say what it is that flips the switch in a child's mind such that suddenly she comprehends something new about the colors she sees on the stiff pages in her chubby little hands. This is more than something to chew on or to feel. These swirls and patterns represent the very things in her larger reality. And something magical is borne in her.

Recently, I came across a children's book that may have been the one that tripped my own particular version of this consciousness: this knowing that patterns of color and line can be representational. I had a strange experience with this little picture book when I came across it again, now as an adult. Simultaneously I saw it with both my infant eyes and my adult ones. My infant eyes remembered a picture of a little person floating in a mass of red. The memory is as clear as can be. But my adult eyes now, in seeing this little book again realize that this picture of Thumbelina has her sitting inside a red tulip. I had no context in my infant mind for interpreting the tulip, nor did my mind register it well enough to define its shape now, not until I saw it again. "How very fascinating," I thought. My frame of context is so much larger. But how odd to realize that it was a thing that grew gradually within me: that first came my comprehension of drawn human figures, but later came the richness of meaning in the background scenery.

Curious to see if the phenomenon would repeat itself, I flipped to another page. Not surprisingly, my recollection of a scene in which a girl and a pair of eyes sat against a background of swirling blue and green, this one turned out to actually be Thumbelina and a frog using a lily pad as a boat while they floated in water. I can hardly describe how strange the sensation was, having these very early memories triggered, even as my adult awareness superimposed the fuller, richer meaning of the illustrations over that infant-view. How strange to re-tap my child-mind so directly, to relive the experience of simply seeing the one thing that mattered or was comprehensible, even though I was in a vague way aware of surrounding colors and shapes.

It is all the more strange because of how familiar those "limited-vision" memories strike me here in my current state of being. Only, now the picture-book is a spiritual thing--and I am but an "infant" in so much of what I see, so limited in what I can comprehend and interpret. When I have these "visionary" experiences and dreams, they are so like the perceptions of the infant-me. Although I "catch" the primary point, still much of the peripheral environment is incomprehensible. I wonder if one day those background images will come clear as I "grow up" into a richer awareness of my spiritual environment and cut loose my fixation on the things that look most familiar in my physical world.

Aside to God--

So strange, but so exciting to hear such a message, such a prediction from You concerning the wisdom that will be mine, regarding the doors of awareness that You'll be opening. Give me the courage to throw off what is of no account, O God, and take me to that next level as I plunge into the depths of Thee.