Our words have power. What we hum to others has the power to shape them for a life of love and service. Just ask Pooh and Piglet.
Can I confess a deep personal sin to you? I had never read A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh until I was 35-years-old. All of my previous contact with Pooh and everyone else in the Hundred Acre Wood was through the television cartoons. I have some memories from childhood of older episodes of the show—Rabbit getting lost in the mist and slowly losing his mind as the sound of caterpillars munching away on the forest undergrowth gradually rises to a crescendo of manic proportions. But mostly I kept Pooh & Co. at a distance because of associating them with the worst of what Disney has to offer.
I was ignorant, is what I’m saying. The books are better than the films / television series / relentless crush of merchandizing. We were gifted a beautiful, complete-tales-of edition, with both Winnie the Pooh and the House at Pooh Corner, full of hand-tipped color illustrations. By way of getting myself out of children’s literature purgatory, Lindsey and I have read this to our kids the last two summers. The kids love it. Lindsey and I love it. We laugh a lot. We ho-ho! a lot. It is a calming, healing read.
My favorite part of the whole Pooh canon is the chapter where Owl’s house falls over in the windstorm with Pooh and Piglet inside it. Piglet climbs out through LETTERS ONLY to find help. And in the “Where will Owl live now?” aftermath, Eeyore suggests that it’d be grand if Piglet gave up his home for Owl. (Whenever I read Eeyore’s dialogue, I say it in my best Mike Ehrmantraut voice. They are kindred spirits, even if Eeyore is decidedly less violent. Rest in peace, Mike.) The sequence that follows is one of the more beautiful sections of literature—children’s or otherwise. And every time I read it, I find myself a bit rattled by Piglet’s response to Eeyore’s presumptive boorishness. He doesn’t get indignant with Eeyore; he doesn’t try to reprove or shame him out of his radical insecurities. He ponders the situation in a simple, uncynical way:
And then Piglet did a Noble Thing, and he did it in a sort of dream, while he was thinking of all the wonderful words Pooh had hummed about him.”Yes, it’s just the house for Owl,” [Piglet] said grandly. “And I hope he’ll be very happy in it.” And then he gulped twice, because he had been very happy in it himself.
The chapter ends with Pooh doing an equally as Noble Thing by welcoming Piglet into his home. Giving someone a home who needs a home is something that rings true around these parts.
But it’s the “in a sort of dream” line that really gets me. What Pooh had hummed about Piglet—in his poem praising Piglet for rescuing Pooh and Owl from Owl’s tumbledown-ed home—shaped Piglet’s response to Eeyore. It formed in him the capacity to be generous, even though it wasn’t his idea. Even when it was his own home on the line. There’s a prayer of blessing that Lindsey and I will sometimes say over our kids at bedtime. I think we found it via The Common Rule. We call it the body prayer, because we lay our hands on their feet, legs, back, hands, arms, eyes, ears—asking God to bless those members of their body for unique purposes.
“Bless their feet, may they bring good news.”
“Bless their legs, may they carry on in times of suffering.”
“Bless their hands, may they do good work.”
“Bless their mouths, may they speak encouragement.”
“Bless their minds, may they gain wisdom.”
“Bless their hearts, may they love You and all that you have made, in the right order. Amen.”
When we pray the blessing on their mouths, I invariably think about Pooh and his hums and the courage he gave Piglet. And I think, “What words am I humming to my kids? To my wife? To myself?” I know that too often I hum discouraging and unkind words to my kids, my wife and myself. Our prayer, and Pooh’s example, bring me to repentance.
The words we hum to others will get stuck in their heads. As Pooh himself observed, “. . . Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.”
Hum wisely.
