Early this week, Bee lost her turtle figurine in the front yard landscaping. She’d placed him in a low weed, then turned away for a minute or two and he’d camouflaged himself right into obscurity. Can you help me look? she asks.
I start to try, but I’m busy chasing Scout, keeping him from the garbage cans, the garage tools, the street. I can’t see it; I’m moving too fast.
So I pick up the baby and settle him onto my hip, and I scan and search from my own 5’5 height, but it doesn’t work. I can’t see it; I’m standing too tall.
The weeds are too much; the turtle too hidden. The problem too big; the solution too complex. Bee and I give up, vowing to work together during the baby’s nap once we’ve both got a free set of hands for digging deeper.
—
This is how the world feels to me now. Too much, too hidden. Our brains hard at work on problems too big; our hearts hard at work on solutions too complex. Few of us with a free set of hands for digging deeper.
Conversation fragments around dinner tables offer multiple theories: Is it less guns? More modesty? Less hashtags? Better healthcare? Less money? More clarity? Less Hollywood?
Which is it: less or more?
—
We’re back in the front landscaping now, and Scout has fallen asleep but the sun has grown colder and the afternoon more dim, and Bee and I return to our knees just long enough to dig and search through the mess of the weeds, and there – waiting, expecting – is her dear turtle hiding in absolute plain sight.
We just needed to get lower, is all, with wide eyes and a bit of dirt under our fingernails.
—
And that’s just the thick of it, right there. The knowledge of a world so awful – of a brush so dense – is precisely what begs us to dig in, to sully our knees, to peer harder at a life so extraordinary that sits right in front of us.
We’d have no reason to do it otherwise.
We don’t get one without the other.
—
There is a temptation to steer clear of the world’s awful. To walk away from the obscure brush toward the tidier, more obvious treasures – pink sunsets, crisp chardonnays, eucalyptus in a jar.
Who wants the toy turtle? What’s it even worth? Why work so hard for such little reward, for the disappointing hope of cracked plastic and cheapened paint?
—
Here’s why: because it matters. Because the fresh air and the cool sun and the dirt under your nails, after a while, start to feel good, start to feel right, start to become extraordinary. Because sometimes you find the turtle and sometimes you don’t. Because you search anyway, for just long enough and it ends up changing you.
