Let me give you a sampling of the questions I’ve been hearing all day, every day for the last week:
How was the first tree planted?
Who gave birth to the first human?
Where did the first seed come from?
How did the first queen bee get born, if only queen bees lay eggs?
How were the first insects made?
If insects were around before dinosaurs - did dinosaurs evolve from insects?
Did you used to be a monkey?
Do houses give birth to new houses?
How did the first fruit tree grow? Because fruit trees grow from the seeds in fruit, but fruit only grows on fruit trees.
JediBoy is doing all his quiet time thinking about origins. Where did the first _____ come from? He is puzzling through ideas of evolution and birth and I’d like to have more to share with him. He is not satisfied with the idea of creation - suggesting that Big Mama or God made such-and-such only leads to a scowl. He has a strong belief that “Big Mama is part of me, and I am part of Big Mama” which came from the book Big Momma Makes the World. He loves that picture book as a story, and he takes comfort from sharing a spirit with the rest of the world - Big Mama is part of everyone, and everything, and so we’re all a part of one big thing.
But he’s stuck on the chicken-and-egg stuff right now. We do have one old book called Why Plants Are Green Instead of Pink (by Julian May) that has two good pages:
Millions of years ago, when the Earth was new, there were no green plants. All living things had one-celled bodies and all lived in the sea and took food from the water.
The water was a kind of ’soup’ full of bits of chemical food. Time passed; the chemical food began to be used up. Some living things found new food by ‘learning’ to catch and eat others. These were the first tiny animals.
Other living things ‘learned’ to make their own food. These were the first plants. Making something is work, and work takes energy. The plants of long ago learned to take energy from sunlight. Today’s green plants still do this.
JediBoy is very interested in that section of the book, but I can tell it’s not enough for him. He wants to have it explained again, in a different way, maybe in a movie or a picture book with photographs instead of pencil drawings. He’d like to think about it from every angle to try and gain a real understanding.
So, I’m here asking you for resources. Picture books. Movies. Clips on YouTube. Websites. I’m not even sure what terms I’d use for a search. I’m wary of doing a search for “evolution” and getting two angry sides of a debate. We’re UU, like many of you reading this, and so I’m not interested in the debate. When he’s searching for meaning and spirituality, I will talk to him about spirit. Right now, he’s searching for understanding of the physical origins of various things. I want to help him be able to understand some of what science understands about the origins of life, and the evolution of higher forms of life. What has worked for your families? Any favorite resources?
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