Pay attention.
Tell about it.
You know one thing I never paid adequate attention to? Animals.
I’m not exactly an animal person.
But I married an animal person. And the first son we had was one as well.
My oldest is not just an animal person though. He goes beyond that. He loves animals to his core. He loves learning about them and studying them. He’ll even work on reading and writing if it’s about animals.
He wants to be a farmer, has for as long as he’s had words to answer: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
It’s what he pays attention to.
It’s what he tells everyone about.
This summer, he got a chance to experience his new school through a summer school program. One of his courses, the last one each day, was completely on animals. He not only learned about them, but he also got to see and touch them in real life.
The course was the best medicine. It brought him to life. He was astonished by each and every animal he encountered. He started sharing with the family about them and also about his profound love for nature too.
This class gave him a lot, but it also gave me something. It helped me pay a little closer attention to what parts of nature my oldest loves the most.
Today, over at the Ignatian Spirituality Dotmagis blog, I wrote about what I noticed.
Here’s an excerpt:
“My oldest son has never had any interest in the commonplace. He focuses most of his energy on what is rare. What always catches my attention, however, is the type of rare things on which he focuses. It’s not the rare plants, animals, or humans that are celebrated for their captivating beauty or their brilliant talents. Instead, it is those rare parts of creation that are most misunderstood…. He searches exclusively for the misfits, the oddballs, and the outcasts and celebrates them for exactly what exiled them in the first place.”
Watching my son fall in love with rare plants like the corpse flower and rare animals like the blob fish (not an animal he met this summer by the way) gave me a better perspective on how Christ moved in the world.
It made me think more about how I wanted to move in this world too.
For the rest of the article, hop on over to the #dotmagis blog, link in my bio.
