An adult’s question is like a line or perhaps the letter Y. It usually has a beginning, middle, and end, and these are each rather simple in form and function. It may have a branch or two, perhaps even several, but it is short, local, limited… pedestrian. It arises from the pragmatism of urges like logical analysis, facts, the production of manipulable feature or quantities, litigation, decision, completion. There is a pre-existing expectation of ‘the answer’ as if this were an object existing distinctly from self, context, or other aspects of a query. As if it could be produced or discovered, proven, and settled.

A child’s question is an entirely different animal. It is like a vast tree whose branches permeate the entire library of their knowledge and experience. You will find branches that are distinct from the tree itself, arboreal anomalies sprouting in mid-air, branching in directions as mysterious and inchoate as they are divine. Of the trunk I will only say that nothing is missing from it.

And the roots of this tree dive deep into the personal and evolutionary history of the child, even into and beyond that of our world. Into the poetic intelligences of chaos and dreaming. There is no possible ‘answer’ because the tree is -a way of knowing- whose offerings and inhibitions -change whenever we traverse its possibilities in a new way-. This is nothing like the adult’s question; it arises from the living wonder of the newly incarnate soul and its purposes are intimacy, wonder, endless learning and the establishment and nurture of new ways of being, relation, and recognition. It is timeless, infinite, and ever-arising. It is, like us, alive, and its produce is humanity, insight, and prodigy…