Thou and I Dawning the Age of the Childlike

In the form of an extended prose poem, or a concatenation of prose poems, this contemplative memoir captures a father's intimate bonding with his son from his third month in mother's womb to his second year of life on mother's earth-a child who at only five months of age embarked from the land of his American birth upon a family world journey of constant moving and vibrant learning. The child's development is therefore uniquely divided into six stages-Age of Swaddling, Age of Standing, Age of Walking, Age of Running, Age of Climbing, and Age of Flying-"ages" specially suited to the father's crystallizing into dictum, maxim, parable, and proof the moral truth and new way of learning and evolutionary growth that the child's learning-events suggested in their hidden depths. This is not the normal learning of a child, and these are not normal childhood stages through which all growing children pass, but world learning and human ages through which all evolving people should rise if truly on life's magical mystical learning-journey. Just as poetic and mystic as the telling of this story, and supplementing the story to unhide further textures of life's depth-meanings, are this book's illustrations painted by the boy-child himself just now a newborn adolescent-still living far out in this same big world, still far from any "home" other than the vast world itself.