7-year-old Fox wanted a history book for his daily reading, so I let him loose in my bookshelves. First, he grabbed my Bible.
“Is this a history book?” he asked.
“Yeah, it’s a kind of history book,” I replied.
“Can I have it?” he asked thumbing the vinyl cover.
“Of course,” I said.
Then he grabbed A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., but it had too many big words for him.
“Here is a history about a Vietnamese monk,” I said handing him Peace is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh.
Reading the editor’s introduction, Fox stopped after reading this poem:
Peace is every step.
The Shining red sun is my heart.
Each flower smiles with me.
How green, how fresh all that grows.
How cool the wind blows.
Peace is every step.
It turns the endless path to joy.
“Daddy, can I write this poem out?” asked Fox with wide open eyes.
“Sure,” I said thrilled because his penmanship needed work.
Fox carefully wrote out each line. He smiled when he wrote “each flower smiles with me.” I was stoked that he was learning to spell smile, peace, and heart. At the end he wrote “Love, Fox.”
“Can you make copies?” he said as he handed me the hand written poem.
I gave him two copies. On one he wrote, “Merry Christmas. Thank you. To Mrs. Kraemer and Mrs. Grant” [his second grade teachers].
I almost cried. What a wonderful gesture. I am so grateful that he resonated with Thich Nhat Hanh, even though he had trouble reading the name. When I told a friend the story, he asked, “Who is the teacher and who is the student?”
What poem would you have a child copy?
While visiting a friend’s coffee plantation on the Big Island of Hawaii, my step-father told the story of how he used to pick coffee beans in Kona when he was a kid. When someone asked how much he got paid, he simply said, “kokua.” Kokua is the Hawaiian tradition of “extending loving, sacrificial help to others for their benefit, not for personal gain.”
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