Unlimited Possibilities

Photo by @rodnae-prod

With Saint Patrick’s Day approaching, our thoughts turn to leprechauns. I used to make a path of tiny green footprints coming into our classroom for my second graders to discover on Saint Patrick’s Day, and they loved it! Their imaginations fueled their excitement, and they searched every day for new signs of our visitors. It was such fun to think of them as real.

I created that particular leprechaun myself, but not being able to perceive something with our limited human senses doesn’t necessarily mean that it doesn’t exist. We know that a dog’s sense of smell is 10,000 to 100,000 times more acute than ours. Certainly they are able to smell things that we would deny exist based on our own senses. Bats, dolphins, and whales use sonar to echolocate, some snakes can detect infrared radiation emitted by their prey, bees can sense the earth’s magnetic field, and jewel beetles can even detect a burning pine tree ten miles away.

Maybe little people do actually exist beyond the imagination of children. Many cultures have stories about all kinds of little people: leprechauns, fairies, gnomes, and more. My Cree friend swears he has seen the “little people” dancing around, helping with a night ceremony. The Blackfeet used to plant tobacco every spring before going on their summer travels. They believed that there were little people who took care of the tobacco fields while they were gone, and the Blackfeet left presents for them of little moccasins, little shirts, and digging sticks before they left.

One thing we know for sure is that there is a great deal we don’t know, and that our limited senses don’t begin to tell the whole story. When we remain open to a multitude of possibilities, we can live our lives with the wonder and excitement of children.

Rosalyn R. LaPier tells about the little people who helped the Blackfeet, along with other interesting stories, in her book Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet. This book can be found in the JMSI Library, as well as Healing with the Fairies, by Doreen Virtue, and The Book of Fairies, by Francis Melville.

Kathleen Crow
Librarian for the JMSI and Belk Libraries