Richard Lewis, who works with children in the areas of drama and poetry, marvels at their capacity for insight. “To Be Alive,” a poem written by a 10 year old named David, sparked these thoughts from Lewis:
Certain pieces of writing, certain gestures of thought that children share with us can become emblematic—they are entryways to understanding the power of a child’s way of gathering insights. In many instances, the child is not even aware of what he has said and will simply shrug if one tries to praise or compliment him. David’s writing provided, for me, one of those emblematic moments. What he verified and illustrated was the act of imagining, particularly for children, as a bodily experience—as well as the ways that language, both spoken and written, thought and dreamt, is nurtured and embedded in the imagination. We are creators of images and caretakers of the images we perceive and communicate; it is the play of our imagining that allows us to inhabit aspects of the world seemingly distant from ourselves. Certainly David demonstrated this when he wrote without hesitation, “Sleep and the wind and I / drift to air.”
This ability of children to easily enter into the life of something other than themselves—to exchange their own mind for the mind of another—grows not only out of their innate playfulness, but out of a fluidity and plasticity of thought that is, in many ways, an inborn poetic gift. It is, perhaps, a way of seeing in which the seer does not distinguish between herself and the nature outside of her, an imaginative grasping of the whole of life before it becomes separated into subject matters and academic disciplines. One might think of it as a wilderness of thought that encompasses a multitude of growing worlds, each connected and dependent on the other—a truly ecological means of thinking and perceiving.
His takeaway:
So much of this childhood ease with both the visible and invisible, what we know and don’t know—the pure sense of expectation and delight in the mystery of what is happening and about to happen—is not only a function of our mind’s ability to balance opposites through the equipoise that is our imagination, but also a way of experiencing the world poetically. I don’t mean a poetry of verse and poems, but a poetic understanding that allows us to stand, for instance, in the middle of a stream and say nothing, and yet to feel, if only fleetingly, a sense of how we and the flowing water are of one being. Or to walk down a city street and accidently walk through the shadow of a tree that seems to move with us, to want to follow us—an expectation, an incandescent moment of which we are suddenly made aware. Each is only an instant, but an instant that carries with it a form of knowledge accessible to children and adults alike, one we rarely include in our current estimates of intelligence or achievement. This awareness should not be seen as a lack of development or a passing innocence, but as a container of thought that we carry with us over a lifetime. Within it, we, the stream, the tree, and the tree’s shadow share the same language.
(Photo by Flickr user enki22)
The Dish 