I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner. In homeschooling, we'd been working away at geography, to the kid's manifest and overwhelming boredom. There I am, trying to explain trade wind patterns and sea routes and how this all relates to early European colonialism, and the his eyes kept glazing over. Clearly this wasn't the right approach.

So on my next trip into town, I picked up a globe at Walmart. It's not a particularly class act, just a standard 14-inch student's version. I don't even know what it's made of--plastic? But it was, in fact, exactly what we needed. The kid had never really succeeded in memorizing the continents and oceans, because they were mere lists of strangely-spelled words to him. Now he could *see*, and by seeing, he could learn. He had the continents down pat in about five minutes, and we swiftly got into a discussion of geopolitical regions. We had a blast.

Of course what makes the globe a better teaching aid than maps is the fact that everything's integrated and in proportion. Everything fits together. With a globe, you can trace a forefinger tip across the southern Pacific, seeing how people could potentially island-hop all the way from Polynesia to South America. You can see the relatedness of deserts on either side of the planet's waistline. You can grasp why the Roaring Forties were a big problem, before the great canals. Things make sense, with a globe.

And with a globe, things take on their proper proportions. Flatten out a sphere, and you inevitably distort reality: Nunavut--already quite large enough, thank you--starts to look bigger than Argentina. You can compare Russia to the Netherlands and get a real sense of the hugeness of one and the tininess of the other.

With a globe, you can get a sense of how the trade winds operate, swirling around the bowl of the North Atlantic. You can watch the tectonic plate holding India crash, with infinite slowness, into Asia, pushing the Himalayas ahead of it like a rug rumpling as you jam a chair leg into its border. You can see where the joins are, how the eastern curve of South America nestles into western Africa. A globe is a lot of fun.

Of course we still need maps too. Scale problem: a globe large enough to help me find my way around the Montreal autoroutes would have to be impossibly large. We need maps for the details, for navigational purposes. But maps don't do nearly as much for our understanding.

It did occur to me that we often get ourselves in trouble by concentrating too hard on our own internal maps--the versions of reality that we construct and live by and see as Absolute Truth (although they may not be true at all). We want to be sure of things; we want to know how to navigate without going wrong. Maps are comforting if you're afraid of getting lost. We also want the sense of mastery and confidence that comes with really knowing the landscape, because that's comforting and ego-enhancing.

Children learn the world by moving outward from familiar into strange: from crib to playpen, from living room to whole-house, from backyard to neighbourhood, from hometown to travel. As we grow, we take in new information from the world around us and integrate it into our own internal maps, correcting and expanding them. The process requires us to put aside comfort and complacency, because those are the enemies of learning. Sometimes it means tearing up a map completely, which can be very hard to do, especially when you'd put such a lot of work into that map in the first place. And finally, we have to be willing to put our maps into perspective. Sometimes what looms so terribly large in two dimensions shrinks considerably when you look at it globally. Sometimes what seemed insignificant takes on much greater meaning, when you integrate the parts into a whole.

One other thing the globe teaches: the boundaries we put on this world are our boundaries that we impose on the landscape for our own sense of safety. They are not Creation's boundaries, nor the Creator's. The divisions among us stem from our own pride and fear, our own sin. We've taught ourselves and each other to be so fearful, by our own bad behaviour.

And the walls once put up are so hard to take down again, and they do such damage... It's much easier to behave selfishly and in damaging ways if you concentrate on your own particular tiny piece of real estate instead of thinking globally. You lose all sense of proportion that way, all sense of the relatedness of things--how we are all interdependent, all responsible for each other, each of us a "part of the whole, a piece of the main."

The features of the globe--the wrinkles and hollows of our mother's face--emerge from a great slow dance of tectonic plates, moving slowly but with enormous force. We can't see that if we concentrate on our own small patches. These motions are too large and too slow. We can say "but this is how it's always been", not seeing that on a larger scale, we are indeed in motion.

We are part of an enormously complex dance in space and time, each one of us a tiny but essential jewel in the movement. The dance plays itself out on a constantly re-shuffled dance floor that spins around its own centre at high speed, wheeling through a space so vast we can't begin to imagine it--and God's even bigger'n that. Infinitely bigger, in fact.

I can hold the globe and spin it, touching the different countries, thinking of the people I've met in the cyberweb that now covers the globe like gossamer--how in spite of the distances between us, we are so close. I spent last weekend in the truest, most genuinely close and loving state of community with people I'd never met face-to-face until then. It was a foretaste of what's to come on the other side of the River: the community of saints, a community of love in larger space and time. In that community, we will truly see and understand what now seems so patchy and disconnected. And we will feel the beauty of this earth, that we only glimpse a little now and again.

I hold the globe and think of this extraordinarily beautiful blue-green world, set like a tiny jewel in the greater dance of stars and galaxies. Turning it, letting my fingertips trail over its surface, I think of the skin of the earth that we live in with so little awareness, so little thanksgiving: this biosphere, so thin--a layer of paint on a beachball--and yet so tough, so rich, so exuberant and painful and messy and splendid. Maybe it's time to get out for a walk and treasure what's under my feet and around my body and over my head. Wouldn't hurt, anyway.