Pinatas always scared me: Blindfolded kids flailing around with a big stick, small heads bobbing, excitement mounting, aggression swelling, the bigger kids positioning themselves for the sweep once the poor creature has been made to spill its treasure, me praying the pinata would break before a child was hit or before I might humiliate my children by demanding the game stop.

 

"It's not your party," someone might have told me.

 

"It's my kids," I would have said.

 

I never stopped the game. If it was okay with everyone else, or nine out of ten else, then probably my perception was skewed, my fears escalated beyond reason. I do foresee danger more acutely than do most people. The term scaredy-cat has been used.

 

But pinata is not just about the danger of someone getting smacked on the side of the head. It's also about that moment when the structure breaks and the tawdry confections spew out from the fractured critter and I wonder, was it worth it?

 

How do you like your beautiful pinata now? It was a work of art. We could have danced as it was raised and lowered, could have found our relationship with the spirit of the effigy, located that energy in our own bodies, become the other, danced the other. Instead we stood and cheered as our children competed for the honor of beating the crap out of the poor critter.

 

We had alternatives.

 

But then, we also have other ways of looking at the metaphor, because we know that to be broken open is as important as being made whole.

 

That breakthrough moment when everything cascades out might be scarier than the earlier walloping. You want to know something important at a moment like that, but everything is there at once—ideas, images, a line of poetry, a law of physics, a scene from a movie, a piece of philosophy, a verse from scripture. You wish everyone could see the connections you see then, but you cannot articulate all that has gathered. So you say nothing—and since no one else thought of it in just your way, it does not get said . . . unless you write about it.

 

As Wislawa Szymborska wrote of the clear conscience of the buzzard who has nothing to fault himself with, of the black panther without scruples, the piranha with no doubt of the rightness of his actions, the rattlesnake who approves of himself without reservation. That's why we turn from the news on CNN to "Nature" on PBS and watch the lion eating the antelope and are not offended.   

 

As Czeslaw Milosz wrote about the innocence of spiders, mantises, sharks, and  pythons. We are the ones who say "cruelty," he says, we are the ones who say "evil."

 

As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote of  those measured moments when something new has come to us, "Were it possible to see further than our knowledge reaches, perhaps we would endure our sadness with greater confidence than our joys."