What is Parenting?
What would it be like to experience blooming as a rose?
I had never thought of it. But when asked “if you could experience anything as a rose, what would it be?”, without a hesitation, H replied, “blooming.”
There was a depth to that answer that I was not expecting. There was a felt experience that surfaced that I hadn’t even imagined. To bloom, what would that feel like? A culmination? Growing taller and wider physically? A feeling of sharing yourself with the world? A feeling of exposing your beauty? A feeling of opening to a new responsibility? All of these questions ran through my mind and a gentle overwhelm crept in as I recognized the beauty of a six year old sharing this.
And then she ran off to play.
From the outside looking in, it would have looked like nothing big or special had happened. But it was the total opposite. For me, her share invited me into an experience that felt so familiar and alive – and so foreign. It felt disorienting, but also like relief and home all at once. It was my own participation in something greater than myself, where life meets life.
Her imagination didn’t need a bridge to get to that experience. She had the natural capacity to consider the rose, recognize it as a living being with its own experiences, and let her imagination bring her into it. The experience surfaced naturally and with ease.
I lost my connection to this capacity a long time ago. Not by choice but by condition, not good or bad, just a product of humanity at this moment in time.
I am noticing something that happens to most of us, gradually, as we grow up - we’re shaped by our current systems and culture that have quietly let this capacity atrophy. Reason, logic, and strategy prevail and truth is only true if there is data and evidence to back it up. And somewhere along the way, our intuitive capacity, our connection with the natural world was edged out.
And yet, here we are today, witnessing a human longing for something deeper and connected. From yoga, meditation, and the study of human consciousness to interspecies intelligence, animal assisted experiences, and biomimicry, humans are beginning to search for and explore. Something in us keeps reaching back.
The moment with the rose showed me that my relationship with my daughters offers me proximity to a connection I’ve been gradually moved away from.
That’s my parenting journey - as two people at different distances from the same thing. My role is to support the gentle structure that creates this space for this capacity to be nourished. From there my girls will naturally show me what I have forgotten.
