There is so much to be learned from children. This weekend, a girl in Central Park - gowned in a ruffled cerulean dress her mother certainly wanted to keep clean - was packing dirt into a water bottle and the dirt was everything. The dirt was water & the dirt was magic & when her brother dumped the bottle, she chased him with all her fury through the grass, cursing him with the dirt that was magic when she said it was. Yes, the children know how to make so much of so little. Yes, the children know how to wild this world we have kept so clean. Yes, I gave my students sheets of paper and they returned to me hundreds of tiny cranes, a dozen dime-sized frogs hopping across the linoleum. They were real to the children and so they were real, period. It is because of them that I am learning to breathe just a little slower. A student gave me a paper butterfly named Bert and told me to keep him safe, and so I did, kept his paper wings fluttering in a terrarium of the dirt that was magic. Yes, the children know what I do not. Yes, the children know that you drive by pressing your hand to the gas pedal, and babies are made when you swallow a watermelon seed just right, and chocolate milk can only come from brown cows. Yes, the children know the only difference between dirt and magic is the time before the first interruption.