Can I get a bit of Leonardo da Vinci’s genius?     
     The guy was centuries ahead of his time with his inventions of flying machines, submarines, scuba suits, machine guns, and military tanks. And his paintings are a standard by which art is still evaluated. Could I have just a part of his brain?     
     I can! We all can!     
     At an exhibit commemorating the five hundredth anniversary of Leonardo’s death, I learned we can gain a piece of his brilliance by practicing unquenchable curiosity.     
     “Leonardo may have been the person with the greatest amount of curiosity of any human who ever existed,” biographer Walter Isaacson says. In Leonardo’s notebooks we discover the Fifteenth Century Renaissance man is wondering what the tongue of the woodpecker looks like, how people can walk on ice, and why the sky is blue. He’s like a two-year-old, raising questions nonstop - a trait we sadly outgrow.     
     But Leonardo never did.         
     Researchers say that only one-fourth of one percent of people are geniuses. Yet any of us can increase our knowledge by asking who, what, where, when, why, and how.     
     We may not master the mysteries of the universe, but we’ll be filled with an awesome wonder of it.     
​     All by asking questions.

     I love writing so much I’ve sometimes forgotten to eat. If it weren’t for my husband, a great chef, I’d turn into a scrap of dried leather. (He thinks I compliment his culinary skills only to keep him in the kitchen, but I relish every meal he creates - especially because I’m not making it.)     
     It’s not that I’m a bad cook. It’s that I’m distracted. My mother used to concoct a twenty-four-hour salad - prepare it a day in advance so the flavors meld. I never start it until it’s nearly time to eat, so I call it my twenty-four-second salad.     
     I’m not the only writer like this. C. Robertson says her poetry is “a disease, a sort of recurrent itch that keeps me awake nights and makes me burn the bacon and causes my husband to use unholy adjectives.”     
     I’ve set some burnt offerings on the table, but I call them “blackened.”     
     Author Virginia Greene Millikin says that just as loaves of bread won’t rise without yeast, stories don’t rise “without that piece of your very heart that you have put into it.”     
     So that’s my problem. I don’t put my heart into cooking. Maybe if I…oops, gotta run. I need to have a meal ready in fifteen minutes so we can get out the door.     
​     (Did I mention my husband is a great chef?)

     It happened in a moment, but the memory has stayed with me for a lifetime.     
     I was about twelve, waiting with my mother in a packed auditorium lobby for the doors to open for a concert. In the crowd, a woman on crutches lost her balance and clattered down the stairs. Everyone froze in silence, embarrassed as she struggled to reach her crutches and hoist herself up.     
     And no one did anything.     
     Then Mom broke from the throng and stepped forward. “Are you okay?” she asked as she touched the woman’s arm.     
     This spoke volumes to me. You see, my mother wasn’t the flashy type. She never sought attention. And in my growing up, we had endured the usual mother-daughter struggles, with me cocky enough to think it was all her fault. But this one event taught me everything I ever needed to know about Mom. And I learned it in a quiet, unexpected moment, which is often when character most clearly reveals itself.      
     I have no remembrance of the concert that night. It was overshadowed by what became the main event - Mom doing what was right when no one else did.     
​     Which challenges me: do I have the character to break through the crowd and do the right thing?

     Ever since I met artist Makoto Fujimura I’ve been longing for “rivers of gold" to fill the cracks in my life that formed when my six-year-old granddaughter Lydia died. She left us a year ago after a mysterious seizure, and I still ache as I recall her dimpled grin.
     Fujimura, a Japanese-American, showed me this Fifteenth Century bowl that was used during tea ceremonies. It was shattered, possibly from an earthquake, but family members held onto the fragments for centuries “to behold because they told the story of those who had used it,” the New York City artist explained.
     Then in the Nineteenth Century, a Kintsugi “master worker of mending,” pieced the shards together with veins of gold in what Fujimura calls “a redemptive restoration. It’s now worth more than it was before it was broken.” And more beautiful, I observed, because of its shimmering rivulets.     
     Fujimura likens this restoration to what happened in his family after 9/11 when they narrowly escaped death, were left homeless, and needed piecing together. Gradually, streams of gold flowed into their fractures, and they healed.     
     The artist says that no matter what earthquakes shatter us, we can mend. “Jesus is the Kintsugi master.” Through him, we “move into the future, and the wounds we can’t dismiss become priceless rivers of gold.”     
     Which encourages me that while Lydia skips along Heaven’s golden streets, my wounds can turn into priceless rivers of gold here as I move into the future. 

My granddaughter Lydia, and a closeup of the rivers of gold.

     More than 100 years ago, folks in my Colorado community with their new-fangled telephones forgot that words matter, wherever they’re spoken. Others gently reminded them about the Golden Rule - to treat others as you want them to treat you.      
     This concept dates back thousands of years and can be found in nearly every ethical tradition. It hasn’t gone out of style either. One hundred forty-three leaders representing the world’s major faiths endorsed the Golden Rule in the 1993 Declaration Toward a Global Ethic.     
     Wouldn’t it be pleasant if today’s politicians took this pledge to follow the Golden Rule? No more snark. No more smears.      
     Even if politicians don’t make this pledge, “we, the people” can. Imagine this: social media would be sociable again. We’d vow not to spread posts that are supposedly “just in fun,” but are actually demeaning.     
​     That would be one way to put “civil” back into our “civilization.”
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