Childhood: Finding Desire
It was Anne Lamott who once said that if you want to know what you should be doing as an adult, ponder what you loved as a kid.
What do you miss about your childhood? This is a question I have been asking people the last few months and the answers are surprisingly similar. Freedom, play, wandering. Here are a few of the responses: “I miss riding my bike on the dirt hills near my house. I miss being able to freely and without expectation, wander all day. I miss playing in the forest. I miss not being afraid when I tried things. I miss not having to be somewhere.”
Summers bring so many happy memories for me. Every year, as soon as school was out, our mom would pack us up and send us from Texas to Upstate New York…The Farm. We were some of the first children who flew alone on a plane and we felt special. We received lots of attention, gifts, food, and a personal hand off to Gram at the gate. (Yes, we used to be able to go to the actual gate to greet or drop off passengers!)
My mom managed life with two children as well as she could given her circumstances. There was no system set up to support mothers, let alone working single mothers. There was no family around and she was on her own. She tried her hardest with the resources and time she had. But one of the best things she did for my brother and me was sending us to spend the summers in Fabius, New York with our grandmother.
I loved most everything about those summers. I found a home in the earth and the creatures: The smell of freshly mow hay, the sound of cicadas, the leaping through waist high fields hay, playing hide and seek, building lean-tos, splashing in the local swimming hole with neighbor kids, sitting in the field with our herd of Appaloosas for hours, and reading, reading, reading. My most cherished memories come from those summers of freedom, play, and my bare feet planted firmly in the earth.
Even now, the earth and wildness is always calling me. When I wander through Jack London’s forest (see picture), I become more alive. It is one of the many places where creativity can blossom. Something loosens and softens in my soul. I miss the freedom I felt as a kid, wandering for hours through the woods and fields, picking wild blackberries on the hillside, sitting for hours by the quiet of the creek in the valley, sketching strands of grass and flowers. That’s why my children’s stories are about that space….the place my soul and body felt most alive, free, and held. It is where I was formed and felt most alive. What stories do you need to unearth?
What did you love as a kid? What do you miss about that time? Can you try to incorporate what you enjoyed into your current life? Are you willing to explore some of what made you “sing” and see what happens? What you loved is still in there and it might just lead you on a different path than you are on…one of more freedom and curiosity.
Your desires might just show you MORE of who you were meant to be.