WHAT'S A PETTING ZOO GOT TO DO WITH REAL LIFE?

Some time back, they brought a petting zoo to our school playground. A small, portable pen replete with small petable lambs, goats, chickens, piglets and a soft, furry, beige donkey. It was Brookfield right in our own backyard, and every passer-by was deliciously compelled to stop, pause, and pet....

What's the point? Here was a one-of-a-kind moment in which all the clocks stopped, all the age differences melted, and everything in this crazy, cockeyed world suddenly made a little sense!

The first thing was our senses were quickly flooded with the sights and sounds and smells of nature. Of God's green earth which somehow manages to exist and thrive even without all our magnificent man-made devices and technologies. You were instantly in touch with the rhapsodic reality that there really is something behind the Wizard's curtain. It's called planet earth. Amazingly, you remember it was here long before us, and will be long after us. There's something so foundational and permanent about this simple but often forgotten fact. We need it more than it will ever need us.

As I made mystic contact with Jimmy the Donkey's steady brown eyes, it was reassuring there's actually something quietly enduring in our oh-so-busy-little-lives-of-restless-ambition. Nothing wrong with ambition, but it suddenly all slips into comforting context when you realize -- remember? -- that traffic jams, Bear losses, sinking markets, cratering war efforts, ugly Wall Street hustlers, and Google crashes are not forever. Why they're not even a blip on the great big scoreboard in the sky.

Jimmy and I took a long time sizing each other up that sunny, manure-fragranced afternoon. I can't be sure if I did anything for him, but he and his little friends sure did a lot for me...