I scoured bookstores, libraries, and my own shelves to look for the right book for you now, at this tender moment in your life, as you turn fifteen and celebrate your Bolivian quinceañera. I was searching for what Kafka said a book should be: “an axe for the frozen sea within us.”
But I couldn’t find that axe. Instead, I found a river.
A river of philosophical and spiritual, scientific and ecological wisdom along which to navigate. I found Jeff VanderMeer, the “weird Thoreau,” who uses speculative fiction to grapple with our relationship with the natural world. I found Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. We’ve already talked about how Coates speaks to his son through intimate letters reckoning with race. And I found Jenny Odell, who asks us to preserve our sacred inner silence in the attention economy.
Powerful as these and other books are, I found no place where all the ideas stream together in a way that might speak to you now. You and I have had deep talks lately, about the difficult things you are going through as you come of age, and how it relates to how we humans might once again be nature.
You’re a mature, thoughtful person. One of your grandma’s wise elder-friends calls you “an old soul.” Remember the question we asked together the other day? It was something like: How can we journey beneath our conditioning in order to better connect with our instincts, heart, and natural mind ... and not the mind a fast society of efficiency molds for us? This is the sort of inquiry we keep getting into, and no book I’ve found comprehensively speaks to it.
Then one day I began to realize something. I didn’t want an axe. I wanted to flow, sharing ideas in relationship with you, and with readers.
When you were six, your first-grade teacher asked the class, “What’s the biggest thing in the world?’”
A kid behind you piped up: “An airplane.” “A mountain!” answered a second student. “A skyscraper,” said a third.
At last, you raised your small hand and said: "My eye is the world’s biggest thing." Your teacher—telling me this story later—said that your response quieted the room. She asked you what you meant.
"An airplane, a mountain, a skyscraper,” you replied. “They all fit into my eye. So my eye is the world’s biggest thing.” The other night, Amaya, I came into your room and gave you a kiss as you slept. The tremendous love I felt for you as I watched you sleep blended with a bit of apprehension because you’re about to come of age in a world of crisis. I felt—as millions of other parents do—baffled by how to bring up our children real. It may sound anachronistic, but, as you turn fifteen, I want to be human with you, our bones and plasma evolving with the patience of a river course. In these first glorious fifteen years of your life, I’ve learned as much from you as you have from me. As you commemorate your quinceañera, what could possibly carry you further? I yearn to reach out with what I can offer: a reminder of the preciousness of your deepest humanity and inner wisdom, the world’s biggest thing.