One Boy Told Me

Naomi Shihab Nye's poem "One Boy Told Me"
Played this reading a few times to my 3 1/2 year old. He remembers it and talks about it all the time now. I guess what I want to remember is that it's the language of a toddler's questions, his contrarian stance, his play that has a revolution in it that I think might help us shift mindsets. You know, like Jacks reply to my explanation of God. I said I sometime see God as a tree. He replied, "My god is a gun." My little Kurt Cobain. His reply made me mad! But now it reminds me that sometimes when we claim something like a natural object as the symbol of a cause it is already a myth. It is already a heavy power tool in any dialogue. It's self-serious, too earnest, not slippery enough to empower. Explication is not really going to make most of us ecologists.