On Growing - A Garden, and the People We Plant In It

On Growing is a lyric-philosophical essay on parenthood, the perceptual inheritance of childhood, and the parent's vocation as cultivation rather than control. It begins from the claim that children arrive perceiving the world "the way it was meant to be seen," and that maturation is less an acquisition than a slow forgetting — a loss it sets in dialogue with Wordsworth's Intimations ode, Rousseau's conviction that the soul is sound as it leaves its maker's hands, Blake's cleansed "doors of perception," and Jung's account of the unlived life of the parent descending onto the child. Against this, the essay reframes the parent as gardener and as bow — drawing on Gibran's image of children as living arrows and on the recurrence of the parent-and-child across art history (Cassatt; the Madonna-and-child tradition) — to argue that an aligned parental life leaves legible, durable traces through time. The piece situates this within the author's "jays" framework and continues the series' use of the "quantum lens," treating maturity as a state superpositioned over a child's original clarity. It closes as a dedication to the author's two children.