Who needs to hear who I see them becoming?
We gave time on December 12 and resources on December 13. Today's currency is words, and today they have a particular job: saying out loud the good you see coming for someone before it has arrived.
If you can, watch the last few minutes of The Polar Express tonight. The 2004 film, directed by Robert Zemeckis, is based on Chris Van Allsburg's 1985 picture book.
The main character is a boy who isn't sure what he believes anymore. On Christmas Eve a train stops outside his house, and he spends the night on it, riding to the North Pole and back. At the start of the night, he almost doesn't go. He stands on the sidewalk in his robe while the train begins to pull away, and only at the last moment does he run after it and climb aboard. By morning he has seen a lot and doubted a lot, and he has made a few more choices along the way.
When the train brings the children home, the conductor punches each ticket one last time, and now each one spells a word. The know-it-all who spent the night correcting everyone gets LEARN. The lonely boy who rode by himself gets DEPEND ON, and when he flips the ticket over, it reads RELY ON, then COUNT ON. The girl who kept stepping up to help the others gets LEAD. The conductor punches the main character's ticket behind his back, and it says BELIEVE.
Each word names something the conductor watched that child start to become over the course of the night, and he hands it over without a speech.
The conductor spent the whole night watching those kids, and at the end he gave each of them one word about where they were headed. A word like that is a want that walks, said by one person about another: it names a good that hasn't fully arrived yet.
Words can lift a stalled hope. When someone is deep in a long wait, it's hard for them to see what the wait is making of them. Someone who has been watching can say it out loud, and a single sentence like that can help a person keep walking for a long time.
Last week's words named what you already see in someone. Today's words look ahead. They name who you see someone becoming, and why you believe it. "I can see you becoming a nurse your patients will remember, because I've watched how you take care of Grandma." "I think this hard year is turning you into someone other people will lean on."
Today, say out loud the good you see coming for someone.
Choose one person whose hope seems stalled. If your household made a plan on December 11, use the Words line from it.
Tell them in person, by phone, or in a note. Use this shape if it helps: I can see you becoming ___, because I've watched you ___.
Sign it or say it to their face. Hope lands best when the person knows who believes in them.
Kids' story: read "One Word Each" from The Overflow Adventure in Wanderful Woods together.
Time: 15 to 30 minutes, plus the movie scene.
With kids: ask, "What do you think your brother or sister will be great at someday?" A child can say it out loud or draw it.
If your kids don't believe in Santa: the scene works anyway. The words on the tickets are the part to watch.
Closing the week: stand in front of the tree together. It holds two layers now. Tomorrow, December 15, Peace begins, and a third green layer goes up above this one.
Hello, my wonderful story friends! Last time, Mr. Moose opened his door and found everybody’s best things waiting in the snow, with no names on them: a jar, a vine, a scarf, honey, acorns, and dry twigs. Now the lantern is ready for the wind. Today, Mr. Moose tries one more time.
Has anybody ever said something to you that made you brave? Let’s go see what the friends say to Mr. Moose.
The morning was gray and still, and the snow clouds sat low over Wanderful Woods like a big soft blanket. Everything was quiet. Even the river under the ice went glub… glub, very softly, as if it was trying not to wake anybody.
Mr. Moose stood at his door with the squash lantern in his mouth. The candle burned inside Ricky’s jar. Daddy Monkey’s new vine was coiled on his back. Shiloh’s scarf was wound around and around his antlers.
He didn’t go.
He stood there. He looked up at the cliff. And all the what-ifs started coming. What if the wind was even stronger today? What if the jar didn’t work? What if they got all the way up there again and had to turn around again? He didn’t think he could stand turning around again.
“Mr. Moose?” said Mr. Monkey. “Are we going?”
“I don’t know,” said Mr. Moose. His voice was very small. “What if it’s too high for a moose?”
Mr. Monkey felt it right in his chest. Mr. Moose had practiced and practiced. He had walked the little hill and climbed the wall and stood in the wind. He had everybody’s best things on his back. And now he was stuck, right here on his own doorstep, before he had even started.
Mr. Monkey wanted so badly to help. He just didn’t know how.
Then Benji hopped up, very quietly, and stood on his tiptoes, and whispered something into Mr. Moose’s big soft ear.
“What did he say?” asked Mr. Monkey.
Mr. Moose blinked. “He said, ‘Brave.’”
Mr. Monkey’s eyes lit up. Of course. You couldn’t carry somebody up a mountain. But you could tell them what you saw. “Everybody!” he called across Sunny Square. “Come tell Mr. Moose one word! One word for what he’s going to be!”
So everybody came. One at a time, they came up to Mr. Moose and said it.
“Steady,” said Daddy Moose, in his deep, slow voice.
“Climber,” said Ricky. “I’d write it down, but you’d have to carry the bark.”
“Brave,” said Benji again, just to make sure.
“Strong,” said Mama Monkey.
Hazel thought very hard. “Fast,” she said.
Mr. Moose looked at his long, slow legs. “I’m not very fast.”
“Maybe someday,” said Hazel.
“Hee hee hee… SNORT!” she added.
Then Bruno came up. He thought harder than anybody. He thought for so long that everybody leaned in to hear.
“Honey,” said Bruno.
Everybody looked at him.
“It’s my favorite word,” Bruno explained.
“Haw haw haw!” went Bruno.
“Hee hee hee!” went Mr. Monkey.
“Ha-ha-ha!” laughed Mr. Moose, and for the first time all morning, his shoulders came down from up around his ears.
Then Mr. Monkey went last. He climbed right up onto Mr. Moose’s back, so he could say it straight into his ear. “I see a moose who climbs,” he whispered.
Mr. Moose stood very still. Then he took one step off his doorstep. Then another one.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”
They went up the littlest trail, past Mama Hedgehog’s snow lantern, which was still glowing. They went through the bear-sandwich rocks. They went up the gray wall on Bruno’s old rope. And out onto the long bare ridge.
The wind was waiting for them up there. FWOOOOSH. It blew over the snow. It blew against their faces. It blew right into Mr. Moose’s antlers.
But Mr. Moose’s antlers were wrapped in Shiloh’s scarf, so the wind went around them, and he didn’t slide backward even a little bit. A tiny bird, blown off course, landed right in the woolly scarf on top of his head and decided to stay.
“Mr. Moose,” said Mr. Monkey, “you have a bird in your antlers.”
“Is it comfortable?” asked Mr. Moose.
The bird fluffed up and closed its eyes.
“Hee hee hee! It’s very comfortable,” said Mr. Monkey.
The wind blew through the little leaf-shaped holes in the squash. And inside, behind Ricky’s glass jar, the candle didn’t even wiggle.
They climbed past the place where the light had gone out before. Mr. Moose looked at that spot as he walked by it. He kept walking.
At the very top of the ridge, there was one more steep part. A wall of ice and rock, not very tall, but very slippery. Mr. Monkey went first, the way he had before. He tied Daddy Monkey’s new vine to a rock at the top. Ricky came up next, and then Bruno, carrying the lantern. Then it was Mr. Moose’s turn.
He put one hoof on the ice. It slipped. He put it on again. It slipped again.
And he stopped. He just stood there at the bottom of the last steep part, holding the vine in his mouth, with his legs shaking. He couldn’t make himself take the next step.
“Mr. Moose!” called Mr. Monkey from the top. “You can do it!”
Mr. Moose didn’t move.
So Mr. Monkey said a word instead. “BRAVE!”
And Ricky called, “CLIMBER!”
And Bruno, who had been thinking of a better one all the way up, called down, “STEADY! Like your daddy!”
Mr. Moose heard them. He thought about the little hill behind the maple. Up and down, ten times, with Daddy Moose beside him. He thought about the frost staircase, and how Mr. Monkey couldn’t see the whole way, only the next step.
He didn’t need to see the whole way. He only needed the next step.
He put his hoof on the ice. He held on to the vine. And he took it.
Then the next one. Then the next one.
And then he was at the top.
He stood there, puffing, with a bird in his antlers and the vine in his mouth. In front of him was a wide, flat, snowy place, the very top of Everest’s high gray cliff. The highest place in the whole of Wanderful Woods.
“You did it!” shouted Mr. Monkey. He jumped up and down so hard that he fell over backward into the snow, and he lay there making a snow monkey, kicking his feet. “You climbed like a mountain goat! You’re a Moose-y Goat-y!”
“Ha-ha-ha!” laughed Mr. Moose, and the little bird flew off his head.
Then they looked around.
Over by the edge of the cliff, on a bare ledge of rock with no tree and no roof, sat Everest Eagle, all alone in the cold. Beside him, tucked safe under a stone, were two small leaves with empty fronts.
Everest turned his great head and looked at them.
Mr. Moose walked over, slowly and carefully, the way he did everything. He took the squash lantern from Bruno, and he set it down on the rock, right next to Everest and the two leaves.
The light came out through the little holes and spread across the snow in gold leaf shapes. It glowed on Everest’s feathers. It glowed on the two leaves. For the first time, the highest place in the whole woods wasn’t dark.
Everest looked at the lantern for a long time. Then he looked at Mr. Moose. And he tipped one great wing toward him, slowly, the way an eagle bows.
Mr. Moose turned around and looked out.
Far, far below lay all of Wanderful Woods, white and quiet, with little lights twinkling in little windows everywhere. He could see the Moose home. He could see the Wishing Tree. He could see the whole woods at once. It was his wish. He was standing in it.
Mr. Monkey came and stood next to him, close, so their shoulders touched.
Neither of them said anything at all. They didn’t need to.
They climbed back down before the dark came, with the lantern left glowing at the top. And all the way down, every time they looked back, there it was, one small gold light at the very top of the cliff.
“What a day!” said Mr. Moose, back in Sunny Square. “I almost didn’t go. Then everybody gave me one word, and Bruno’s was honey. A bird sat in my antlers. I got stuck at the steep part, and my friends called up the words, and I went. Mr. Monkey called me a Moose-y Goat-y. And now there’s a light at the top of Everest’s cliff.”
Mr. Monkey whistled, and Mr. Moose hummed, and together they sang:
We are better together,
Moose and Monkey forever.
And high above Wanderful Woods, at the very top of the highest cliff, a little squash lantern glowed in the dark beside a great quiet eagle, and everyone in the woods who looked up could see it.