| |

Echoability

BySarah Dixon Young

An echo is a reflection. 

While snowshoeing, my son and I heard our conversation echoing off of our house. We laughed in the reflection of our sound, just as we might have laughed at the reflection of our own snowy faces in a mirror. 

Coleridge wrote, “In the Poet was comprehended the man who carries the feelings of Childhood onto the powers of Manhood, who with a soul unsubdued, unshackled by custom, can contemplate all things with the freshness, with the wonder of a child…”

We enjoyed our echoes with the wonder of children. Then, we got back to the task at hand: pacing out our garden. Here in the snowy north, we pace out our garden on snowshoes sometime after the first day of Spring. The echoed conversation actually consisted of where we should plant the pumpkins and if any of them would grow to be as large as Cinderella’s carriage. 

However, before we can have prize-winning pumpkins, we must plant the small seeds in dixie cups in the laundry room. My children pry one seed open, examining the cotyledon within. They ask, “How could so small a thing produce so many large pumpkins?” We discuss day three of creation when God made all the plants and put a seed inside each one so that they would be able to produce more of their kind.  Every seed is a reflection, an echo, of a spiritual truth. Perhaps that’s why Jesus’s parables often start with seeds. 

Coleridge wrote, “It is scarcely surprising that we find everywhere tantalising repetitions and echoes of ourselves in nature, that the mind is everywhere echo or mirror…”

My children look at the things God has made, and the echo reverberates through their minds, making connections and painting pictures of the truths the Creator intended for them to discover like treasure. But the science of an echo shows that when sound waves encounter a surface, they don’t just fall flat. Instead, they bounce off and create a distinct repetition of the original sound.  

Malcolm Guite, in his excellent biography of Coleridge, wrote, “…Our mind itself is a repetition, an echo, of the Mind of the Maker, in whose image we are created.” We were made to reflect God’s sound. When we encounter it in His creation, we can choose to allow it to “bounce” off of our minds, echoing into a world hungering for the beauty and goodness of the Creator. 

This is true creativity. 

Exposing our children to outdoor play, nature walks, field trips, and hands-on experiences gives them the opportunity to be the surface that the beauty and goodness of creation echo off of, projecting the image of the Creator in their paintings, writing, conversations, wood working, mud pies, and other creative endeavors.  Perhaps the cotyledon of a pumpkin seed will plant a seed of understanding in their minds that grows into a work of art that they share at a fair or with their friends. This is imagination at its best.  God created us with imagination, the echo ability, where perception of the good, the true, and the beautiful becomes the reflection of creativity.

Coleridge, an imaginative child, spent hours outdoors imagining that he was the hero in the scenes of his favorite books. He cultivated his imagination from early childhood and matured to understand it more as an older adult, recovering from addiction.

“The Primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am,” Coleridge wrote in his Biographia Literaria.  “The Secondary Imagination I consider to be an echo of the former… it dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to recreate.”

The challenge for us as parents is to expose our children to those primary perceptions which are most beautiful, and true, and good, full of virtue and character, while shielding them from the noisy man-made perceptions on every screen in every room. Then, once our children have imbibed the echo of the Creator from the world He has made, we can guide them to reflect what they have seen, to poetize their experience so that they are a “translation,” a “repetition,” an “echo” of all that is good in this world. Then, it may just point others to what is good beyond this world. 

In teaching them, perhaps we will learn this ourselves.

Guite wrote, “[Coleridge’s] life mission [was to] bring together the active, shaping spirit of the imagination, on the one hand, and the traditions and mysteries of Christianity on the other.” Our echoability increases with every step of the snowshoe, every seed in a dixie cup, every conversation about the potential of a cotyledon, every hand in the dirt, every echo off of the back of the house. 

As we look up new pumpkin recipes and dust off the old ones, we learn again that growing things produce fruit. They are themselves echoes of deeper realities, making for lively parables and transformative stories that spark our imaginations. Our imaginations are but the surface that reflects the echo of the meaning that God tucked away inside of each seed, and that is a seed worth cultivating. 

Sarah Dixon Young
Latest posts by Sarah Dixon Young (see all)
   

Leave a Reply

Favorite Posts