Lately, I have been thinking about the development of a fetus in the womb. I looked at Google and read that a human egg is the largest cell the body produces and it is about the size of the thickness of a human hair. From that and the tinier sperm, comes a baby weighing about 7 ½ lbs with eyes, ears, breathing, crying out, all ready to live and grow. Wow!
Years ago, we read "The Tangled Wing" by Melvin Konner and it gave me an appreciation of the amazing and improbable connections that get linked throughout that growing brain. From one side of the head to the other, arching over to where it is going to be needed. Wow!
I try to be open to the people I know and love, to be open to their fears and delights, their achievements and their failures. But, c'mon, I don't have a high-level empathy apparatus like some counselors and leaders. I open my feelings up to a life of poverty and disease, to a life of fear and failure or to the confusion of a recent graduate or a beginning teacher. Wow, it's hard!
We have a field of prairie plants. I look at the struggle for life, for sunlight and moisture. I see the plants crowding each other, fighting for a chance. Wow!
We watch "Call the Midwife" and see what the midwives and the nuns did according to a diary made by one of them. Hope and struggle, life and spirit and ignorance and love. Wow!
You can see how a person could get wowed to death.
