The child mind and the adult mind. And the adult is the child. And the child laughs, and the child cries. Proverb for a New World If the birds don’t sing, will the sun still rise? It will, if it’s wise. Awake, little ones! Hear the sun sing! See the birds fly! [ 775 ]
The language of Henry James in A Small Boy and Others is a softly spoken dream that gently begs the use of the reader’s own tongue. The dream is in color; it has no corners or edges or sides; it is more like the distance one travels between a robin’s breast and a fully ripe strawberry — the kind of journey a child makes many times each day — even […]
Star so pale — her worn out shoes, her tired back, her eyes once blue. Sky so low — garden wall — child listens, sirens wail. Where they go — what I know — a quiver full of symbols in a gale. [ 729 ]
Our apricot tree has bloomed right through the frosty weather. Now we’ll see how many of them stick. The first blossoms appeared during the last week of February. Now it’s St. Patrick’s Day and they are still opening, some puffed and ready, while the oldest look like hairy spiders attached to the limbs — at least that’s the way they looked yesterday afternoon, when I paid the tree a visit […]
Just after dark, two women in their fifties, home from work, one out to get her mail, the other stretching her legs on the sidewalk after her drive home — both offer a greeting and a smile — and I feel like a little boy on a merry-go-round, turned by fate’s precious little girls — who kindly do not laugh at me. March 3, 2020 [ 683 ]
Opinion, some say, is a right we hold — as long as we agree — but I prefer to understand and learn, to whatever possible degree my limits deign to show — and to pray the child in me may have the room to play and grow — and never stop, and stand, and say, I know. [ 661 ]
A baby’s high chair so high his head’s in the clouds, and, to feed the dear angel, we must climb the nearest mountain through ice and snow with his tiny spoon in our hands — but why do we imagine such things? To explain, I suppose, the ice on our shoes, and the spikes and the ropes. A man’s thoughts so low we must sound the very depths of hell […]
When you see young children living and working their beautiful miracles, do you smile and say, They are something at that age, or, We are something at that age? They, or we — the difference, I think, is a great one, and tells much about you. The same might be asked of how you view those who are far ahead of you in years. Because the very young and the […]
When a child draws a face like this, we wonder at his gifts and curses, as if age were something art rehearses, and art what age reverses. [ 566 ]
Wondered the child, Is God in the clouds, or are the clouds in God? And God said, That is a question I love. And the child sang low. And the child sang on. [ 504 ]
