When I first met Joseph Chilton Pearce we discussed how bonding creates an intimate channel of communication through which shared meaning flows. Oh, if we were only mindful of the deeper meaning of the meaning we share.

The mother's name for the object, and her emotional state are built into the structure of knowledge of the object the child creates. All without any evaluation on the part of the child.

This obvious, but not so obvious, observation opens to a much larger developmental force - state specific learning and performance. The emotional state of an experience is woven into the body and the intellectual memory of each experience. Each of the primary brain centers - thought, feeling and action - resonate an internal image or state of each experience. We call the composite image or state memory. In truth there is a separate memory unique to each major brain center. Stimulate the physical brain and the associated emotional and symbolic images-states are reincarnated, or, as we say, re-membered as a latent experience of the original event. What we abstract as thought is just that, an abstraction. What is primary is the state. Some states cripple; feeling observed, compared, judged. Some provide the optimum context for learning and performance; what we call original or authentic play in which psychological failure is not part of the experience.

Like Alice in Wonderland, Carly Elizabeth changes so much each day it’s hard to know just who she is. Blink and she changes again. Astonishing! There is no other word to describe it, watching, day-by-day, as Carly’s capacity to imagine explodes. Equally astonishing is the way most of us miss what is taking place, right before our eyes.

September snuck in like a clever thief. You can feel the days getting longer. Barbora, at twenty, is a sparkling young woman. She arrived a week ago, a Czech Au Pair, French for ‘on par,’ meaning equal, a member of the family for a year to help care for Carly and to create a rich bilingual environment. With much of her extended family in Europe it is important that Carly Elizabeth speak Czech, a challenging language to master.

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At 4:15 PM July 29, 2014 Carly Elizabeth took her first breath. Today, July 29, 2016, twenty-four very short months later I routinely chase her around the bed saying; “You can’t do that! It’s time for your bath.” While she replies, giggling; “No way…”

Is it simply that I am paying more attention? Is it that I have, like an investigative journalist, been chasing what it is that makes us fully human? Is it the experience of having fathered two wonderful and wonderfully different boys’ now grown mature men? The truth is, I’m still head-over-heels amazed at what Carly accomplishes daily, and I have been for the past two years. I share that special wonder Bev Bos described having cared for young children for forty years and mentoring over 6,000 early childhood education workshops.

“The longer I do this the closer to tears I am when I watch children. I can feel that rush. My eyes well up experiencing that freshness, the aliveness, the spirit of children. What I didn’t understand when I first started working with children was how exceedingly interesting every day was going to be. There’s a spirit inside every child and every day it seems to change because they’re interested in new and different things and this has kept me so fully alive. There have been Masters before us; Piaget, Montessori, people who really, really liked children as much as I do. I don’t think you can stay fully alive unless you’re with children. It keeps me grounded.”

Amen!

Like water pouring over Niagara Falls neurons connect as capacities unfold at astonishing speed. This is simply what Carly Elizabeth, and every new human being, is, exploding growth and change. We tend to relate intelligence with what is known. People who know a lot are considered intelligent. Dr. Frankenstein, the true monster in Shelly’s tale, knew a lot but what he knew could hardly be called intelligent. How many Frankensteins do you know? You may be one yourself.

Because the unnatural “routine” hospital birth of our first son was so devastating, the home birth of my second son ten years later was a tipping point. My real education began when I graduated from college and discovered I really did not know much about anything. Then came the insight that information isn’t intelligence. Thought and intellect are not wisdom. The monster in Shelly’s novel was the mad scientist Dr. Frankenstein, not the tragic creature he created. Compulsory schooling is mostly conditioning and conformity training not real learning which the safe, bonded, unfrightened body and brain does naturally, with complete attention and passionately lifelong. I discovered that patriotism is both a false identity and an act of violence. Health is the absence of dis-ease, something the pharmaceutical cartels can’t patent or profit from. I began to grasp what a miracle it is to be gifted this human experience, the Mt Everest of evolution’s billions of years of trial and error. The false hopes and false fears that sustain society, culture and my personal identity were dissolving. Whoops! If not ‘that,’ then what?

The other day, while preparing her majesties’ morning buffet, I asked Carly Elizabeth if she would like some coconut, freshly cracked out of the shell. “No,” she replied, perfectly stated with a casual air. MaMa and TaTa, the Czech version of DaDa, had been flowing for several months along with the regular crop of toddler babbling. This was startlingly different. Since that beginning the variations of ‘no’ have replaced, more or less, Carly’s banter. “No, no, no, no, no” she sings or mumbles, shaking her head appropriately and with all the correct facial expressions. As predictable as this event is, everyday miracles take one’s breath away. Another milestone. Carly Elizabeth will never be the same, nor will I and Z.