Marotta: Looking at the World with Reverence

Marotta: Looking at the World with Reverence

At one point during the long winter just now ending, I saw a sweet tender film with one distressing scene, in which an otherwise shy and modest young woman stands naked before her lover and invites him to say anything that comes into his head about what’s wrong with her body.

Though we squirm to see the pain on her face when he wades in, the rest of "Lovely and Amazing" is just that. A tender and memorable film, its title has stayed with me for months.

It must have been with me the afternoon I spent in an Arizona bookstore when that family approached, the dad small of stature but powerfully built, and his children eight and six.

It was the elder with the long braids who addressed me first, on learning that I write books.

"I read LOTS of books!" she exclaimed, her small spectacles bridging a nose and cheeks dusted over with a sprinkle of coppery freckles. "I’ve read the whole Clan of the Cave Bear series: The Valley of Horses, The Plains of Passage…."

I looked up at her dad, who nodded. "She has read all of them," he said. "And all of Tolkein too."

"When did you START reading?"

She shrugged her shoulders.

"When she was two!" piped up her younger brother. And when the child herself frowned skeptically, added "Uh-HUH! Mom says!"

I asked him if he too read this way.

"He reads, but math is what he really loves," his dad said. "My wife and I decided to home-school our kids. They’re small for their ages and Emaly seemed advanced in the area of language. We wanted an environment for them that was non-competitive and nurturing and nothing seemed nicer than learning at home."

"Look at this!" the great reader broke in, then passed one arm clear behind her head, turned the corner with it and placed its fingers in her mouth.

"And this!" cried her brother, pulling one foot backward and around ‘til it touched his ear.

To me these children were lovely and amazing, and when they moved away to browse in the store, it must have been a lingering sense of awe about them that directed me to a book of photographs in a nearby display.

"Pure" is a collection of stirring black-and-white Ann Geddes photos depicting very young infants, each reposing in a different position on its mother’s body: curled like a fiddlehead fern and sleeping on her belly; or nestled in the curve of a hip that rises upward, then drops gently down toward the leg; or stretched out along her back, the mother’s flesh in each case still soft with gestation’s abundance.

I studied these images; and I think they were with me still as I flew home the following day, crossing the country from southwest to northeast.

I looked down, sometimes at desert sands as rippled and tawny as the hide of a lion; sometimes at the precise squares of farm-fields which, whitened by snow, looked like the silver ice-cube trays of yore. From high in the air looking down at this country, you feel that you are seeing her naked; that she stands before you exposed and awaiting your comment.

But then you remember that a nation is a human construct, and what you gaze at really is a landscape: hills and valleys, like the valleys and hills in the far or middle east, or distantly lying to our north and south.

What you gaze down at is Earth. She is our mother, and for eons our fate has rested in her hands.

Now hers rests in ours.

May reverence for all life now guide our actions.

Contact Terry anytime at tmarotta@ attbi.com