Babysitting an active 1 1/2 year old this week hasn’t given me much time for quiet meditation, but I did manage to rediscover some quiet beauty in the ancient art of blowing bubbles.
Turns out that Logan is fascinated with, or, perhaps, fixated on, blowing bubbles, something he recently learned from his neighbor Taylor. We ended up blowing bubbles at least once every day for the last nine days, and, far more often, twice a day.
Turns out I’d forgotten just how fascinating bubbles could be, but the more time I spent blowing them the more fascinating they became. At first I was content to merely blow a string of small bubbles because that was enough to amuse Logan. Later, though, I remember blowing large bubbles when I was younger, and so I was determined to regain that ability. Learning to blow more slowly, perhaps even meditatively, was definitely the key to blowing big bubbles.
Even later, I remembered that we used to catch bubbles we’d blown before they hit the ground and disappeared. Although I’m a little stiffer and quite a bit slower than I used to be, I managed to master that skill again, too. That, in turn, turned to the art of blowing multidimensional bubbles.
For the first time, though, I consciously realized just how magically beautiful bubbles are as they float off to an uncertain future, all the more beautiful because such beauty obviously can’t last.