I Don't Want To Know

Tonight I took a walk after I'd finished work. I telecommuted today so at 5:00pm I felt the need to just get outside and breath some fresh air. There is a very nice 3.2 mile circular walk that I take...sometimes it is just enough.

I was about 1/2 mile from returning to my home when I saw this giant leaf on the sidewalk. I couldn't believe my eyes. How had a leaf grown to such proportions? I picked it up and carried it home with me, all the time marveling at my find. Like a little child who had just found an abandoned kite, I was beaming. The first thing I thought of was that I would go home and Google it...I will find out what type of tree could grow such a fine specimen of a leaf. Then I stopped myself. Isn't that just like us nowadays? We find something wondrous, something we've never seen before, something we don't understand and our first instinct is to 'go home and Google it'.

I decided not to.

I held that leaf by the stem, twirling it in my fingers, and wondered about where it came from. There were no huge maple trees in the area.  I let it dance about in the breeze as I strode down the street. I held it up and it caught the air like a sail. It would have made a beautiful sail for a little boy's wooden boat. Maybe it was a leaf that never fell from the tree last autumn...or the autumn before that...and just kept growing. A strong leaf that didn't want to give in to the inevitable; that loved its life so much it would not give in to the call of Mother Nature. Or, if I were to use that elusive imagination of mine I might believe that it belonged to a giant maple tree in a world hidden by clouds in the sky...and it somehow found its way down to earth...for me to find. I thought it would make a lovely cradle for a pixie baby in the woods, it was certainly large enough. Hmmm, maybe it was the hat from a woodland elf which had blown away and now he was wandering about the mushrooms looking for it.

I'm sure there is a perfectly logical reason for the leaf, for its size, but I don't care to know it. I loved that feeling of child-like wonder I experienced during that last 1/2 mile of my walk.  Our creativity comes from places we haven't visited in a long time, when we didn't have all the answers, and when we couldn't pull the answers out of cyberspace with a few clicks of a button. It's okay to 'not know' sometimes, to make-believe we have the answer. I think that when we can let go of needing to have all the answers, the door will be open for the answers to find us.

Susan