I sit to write, find my breath and tune into my feelings, focusing at the center of my chest, in/out, up/down, dropping my attention from thinking to hearing. Listening inwardly for what to write.

My grandson Taylor appears to me. I hear Taylor, TT we call him.

Yesterday his mother, my daughter Alisa, found TT crouched behind his dad’s roomy leather chair, holding a plastic red, yellow and green dump truck and a book, “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.” She said, “TT, what are you doing back there?”

He said, “I reading to truck.”

He was turning page after page, mumbling 2-year-old gibberish, pointing out pictures to his toy. “Fishies,” he’d say.

A while ago, Alisa sent a text to the family headed: “Taylor story.” It ended with “His mind!”

Here’s the story: Taylor found a little bug on the playroom carpet, plopped down next to it and said, “Hi, Mr. Bug. I TT.”

Then he ran to an easel chalkboard, scribbled a bunch of circles and lines, toddled back and said, “Mr. Bug, I make you ‘pider web to play.”

I wrote Alisa that to me this story shows his heart as well as his mind and that his heart melts me. I wrote: “He has inborn empathy.”

TT’s Uncle Zac, my son, called in tears and said, “Oh, that story of Taylor. Mom! How many people would’ve squashed the bug? Ma, that bug was like me until I got to Walnut Hill School for the Performing Arts. All of us artistic types had been like those bugs. Former teachers in middle school and elementary school had tried to squash us. Then we landed in this creative, empathic high school where the teachers opened up for us big webs and safe places to play.”

When I see Taylor, for real or in my mind, I stop. I pay attention. I really hear him. Maybe I hear my own breath, my own feelings a little better, too. I listen more.

When I visited last week, Taylor told me he had seen a crab at pre-school that day. Then he said, “Susu, I scared.”

Alisa asked him, “Then what? Tell Susu what happened next.”

He said, “I see crab more and I all-done-scared.”

When my mind thinks of Taylor, my heart is all-done-scared. When I hear him say, “Hi, I TT,” I feel more daring.

My dad used to walk up to people who seemed like strangers and offer his hand. He’d say, “Hi. I’m Ray Lebel.”

As a little girl, I wanted someday to be able to do that, “Hi, I’m Sue.” But as TT would say, “I scared.”

I thought then that I would have to be more grown-up, have more courage to be all-done-scared. And only if I were all-done-scared could I extend my hand, lean beyond my comfort zone, reach out when my mind or heart wanted to pull back. That’s a scary body thing, reaching beyond. I could only do something like approaching a crab if I were all-done-scared, as if bravery could only burst forth in some future moment.

But Taylor is teaching me. I am getting gutsier about walking into something like meeting a life’s bug, or any crabby situation. I am more able to say “hi.” It’s getting easier not to squash or judge what bugs me, but to open to it: “Hello Mr. Fear, hello Mrs. Sadness, hello Miss Joy. I Susu.”

And then, even before I grow up, weave a web so we can play together.

Susan Lebel Young, MSEd, MSC, is a retired psychotherapist. Her new book is “Food Fix: Ancient Nourishment for Modern Hungers” (March 2013).

Email: susan@susanlebelyoung.com.

FMI: www.heartnourishment.com

 

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