The Bear Under the Tree
- Jan 20, 2023
- 4 min read
On Childhood, Wonder, and Letting Go
"The beauty of a butterfly can be as striking and memorable as the most exquisite of poems." – Nabokov
I recently returned to the garden that I would visit with my daughter all those years ago, The echoes of our time together were there. The bear’s tree, the stream with little fish that we’d feed, the bridge, the little woods where the T-rex lived. Those landmarks were still there. But it felt quiet. Lonely, There were people around. And sound. But in my head, things felt distant.
I walked past our old spots with a mixture of sadness and nostalgia. I miss those years. I can say without hesitation that it was the most beautiful time in my life.
Being there made me think about how brief and fragile those moments really were. How is it that you close your eyes and ten years have passed and now the stories and characters and fun and play are all quiet? And it wasn’t for a lack of imagination. I could picture the exact scenes from the exact spots where we would play.
But the moment was over. My daughter’s childhood was over. Everything had fallen into place for that brief period of time and it became something that transformed my life.
I stood there by that tree and I could almost see it. My daughter kneeling in the dirt, carefully arranging sticks and stones into vegetables for the bear that only existed in our imaginations.
And for a moment the years seemed to collapse. The past and the present were right there under that tree.
But that moment was brief, because I realized something quickly. Even if my daughter were there beside me, the bear wouldn't come back.
The bear was gone.
At this point, I'm not going to lie and say that the Blue Flower entered my mind there under that tree, because it didn't. All I felt was sadness.
But later when I got home I couldn’t help but replay that moment under the tree. And it was then that Nabokov came to mind.
And it’s because of the butterflies, the flying "blue flowers" that were all over that garden that day. Nabokov loved butterflies. He spent years studying and collecting them and even wrote about them.
Of course, part of the reason was because butterflies are fragile and beautiful, but there's more to it. Butterflies represented a mystery to him.
The mystery of meaning and time.
He wrote:
"The cracked vertebrae of time underline the mystery of wings."
It's kind of a cryptic line. But that tree in the garden gave me some insight.
The mystery isn't that beautiful things disappear. Of course they do. The mystery is why they continue to matter after they're gone.
Childhood ends. Summer ends.
Whole seasons of life can slip away. And no amount of longing will bring them back.
The question is what are we supposed to do about this.
Many people answer that question with nostalgia. They spend their lives looking back,
But not the Romantics or Nabokov.
Because the Blue Flower was never behind us. It's always up there ahead, down the path.
It's always calling. The goal isn't to return to childhood. It's to carry it forward in the way that childhood taught us.
I realized that the bear had never really been the point.
The bear was a doorway. He taught us how an ordinary patch of dirt could become a vegetable garden. And all the stories in the garden, they taught us how to see. How to recognize the magic in the world. Wonder. That's why the garden wasn't simply some kind of lost paradise. It was a teacher.
The bear was gone now. Not because we stopped believing in him. But because he had done his job.
And that’s the whole point. You can't catch a butterfly and keep it forever. It’s not meant to stay. You follow it. It’s an invitation. Just like the Blue Flower. People make a mistake when they think that just because the chapter ends the story is over. It's never over.
This is the lesson that Abigail learns at the end of Sparkle Valley. She spends three books trying to save Sparkle Valley— Emily's imagination. But what she eventually learns is that saving something and freezing it are not the same thing.
And then she’s faced with that impossible choice of whether to use the Powder of Life. The hardest thing she ever did wasn’t defeating the Smortzle or fending off the Beast, it was letting Emily grow up.
Every parent faces a similar version of that same choice. Only not with the Powder of Life or a talking doll.
They face it with birthdays and graduations, and kids moving away.
It's that crushing realization that the kid that you loved at six years old is gone forever. And yet that person still remains. That relationship also remains. It's different, transformed, but it’s real. And that's life.
And the hardest thing to do is to let go without becoming cynical.
Because there are two mistakes you can make.
You can pretend that nothing's changed. Or you can decide that nothing matters because everything changes.
But the Blue Flower rejects both of those things.
It says OK, childhood ends. The portal to Sparkle Valley closes. But keep walking
And it's not because the past wasn’t real. It was. And there are butterflies up ahead.
The garden I shared with my daughter is gone forever. Yet at the same time it isn't. I can't return to it. But it taught me through all those years how to recognize beauty when it appears again.
The butterflies fly away, the bear disappears, but the Blue Flower keeps us moving forward.
