Yesterday I read an essay by a father, Dave Kim, who was surprised how much his 8 year old son loved the book Heidi published in 1881 by Joanna Spyri.  He and his son went to the village where the book is set, Heidiland, and again, his son loved exploring and understanding whether it was a real little girl, or a composite who lived there.

His son was especially enchanted with these words which I remember reading as a child. It’s sunset and Heidi is with  her goatherd pal, Peter:

A golden light lay on the grass and flowers, and the rocks above were beginning to shine and glow. All at once she sprang to her feet, “Peter! Peter! Everything is on fire! All the rocks are burning, and the great snow mountain and the sky! … Look at the rocks! Look at the fir trees! Everything, everything is on fire!”

Dave Kim writes: This was one of his son’s favorite moments. “Do rocks actually glow in Switzerland?” his son asked him one morning.

I’m with that as I consider which books my now five year old grandson responds to.   One favorite is Ziji, The Puppy Who Learned to Meditate by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Torey Hayden.  When he spends the night, we read it before he goes to sleep.

Yesterday a friend was here and pulled a book off a shelf, The Lost Words, by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris.  They made a “spell book” to conjure up lost words that were left out of the most recent edition of the Oxford-Junior Dictionary.  Words like acorn, bluebell, dandelion, heron, kingfisher, newt and otter were replaced with attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice-mail.

The outdoor and natural were displaced by the indoor and virtual.  Most of us interact virtually each day, and this morning I read a poem on-line by Wendell Berry about watching one leaf fall, and I felt that leaf falling through me bringing peace, integrating all the ways we perceive.