I drove halfway across the state of MN today to watch my daughter fly.

Rachel is a senior at the U of MN Morris.  She is a biology and environmental science double major.  As part of their graduation requirement, students are asked to prepare and present a lecture on a topic.  The lecture is to last forty-five minutes or so, with ten minutes for questions from students and faculty.

I’d be hard pressed to say exactly what her paper was on.  It had to do with how it is mercury is spewed into our environment and taken into the most basic lifeforms and transmitted up the food chain to humans.  It was informative (who knew that all those chemicals and the ways they bond would translate into tremors for the health of creation) and it was clear to me that she not only knew a lot, but was excited to share it with her peers and instructors.

How is it that this is so?  How is it that we gestate and give birth, raise and love, bless and send, and observe flight?  How is it that children morph into adults who have such passion for their worlds and such conviction that they can create better and saner ways of encountering it than the generations that preceded them?  How is it that a mom can bounce across the state and land in her daughter’s world and watch there a miracle unfold?

I’m in awe.  Somehow that girl ended up in my life.  Somehow I got to hold her and sing to her and breathe the air she breathed and now, in flight, she thinks to invite me to share the loft.

Blessed am I among women.