If You’ve Ever Been A Child…

They dance like ballerinas, around a toy-filled floor, scattered with memories & ideas taking them to a land where fairy princesses live.

Chopin and Beethoven play in the background, like a carefully orchestrated backdrop to their wildly imaginative dreams.

I see them bow and spin, laugh and giggle, as if the whole world and all there problems left in an instant. The moment they voluntarily slipped on those tutu’s, placed on their too-big ballet slippers, they were called into theatrics….

Eventually them rolling on the floor in belly holding joy and hysterics.

I turn on the internet and almost just as instantly regret it; pointed fingers, blame shifting, loads of excusses of why the world is one way.

Lashing words like knives, people attacking one another for doing what they do, believing different from them.

I miss seasons of simple. The laughing giggles of my own childhood, where my cousin and I would slip on roller skates and pretend we were dancing on ice, in my parents cement basement.

Still, in a world of so much genius, information that keeps multipying; questions growing faster than answers….I wonder why we almost always feel like we need a host of solutions, qualifications, conditions before we can go on….

Or can get lost in the childhood wonder of little girls or boys, before they grew up.

Do you remember being little? The wide-eyed wonder, stories that felt trapped in your heart, like a bursting geyser. Thoughts and dreams captured only by the reality that you were small, but didn’t care, because….

In little bodies often lies the biggest dreams.

In small stature, there often captures gigantic proportions that don’t have limitations or people “teaching us”, warning us, or loved ones offering “limits” or “restrictions” on dreaming.

We were free. Free to dream and live and be, just like we were.

As a child, I was often princess and warrior, make-up artist, cook, teacher, and hospital nurse.

As  a child, one moment I would play soldiers with the boys next door, or be a random explorer, climbing the cherry tree, our property held….

In my mind I would shift ethnicity, being Asian or the Indians I read about who I loved and lived off of nature.

Nothing held us back, as children. Nothing limited us, except maybe adults who tried “warning us” for our so-called “benefit” that something couldn’t be done, telling us what dreamed was really “impossible” or “wrong’….

Only because they themselves had forgotten to dream.

As a child, boys would play with girls, the older kids would shoulder the younger children, in a game of “Chicken Fights”. The stronger would often be gentle with the littler ones. The ignorant would be taught with patience and perseverence, by those brighter or more competent.

We didn’t have walls; walls telling us who to trust, how to run in angry packs, or angry mobs or divisions created at every flick “on” of the internet.

Races melted, truly melted so much clearer before. One person felt offended and couldn’t share the fault of ones ignorance with thousands, if not millions with others who easily offended and targets for shared pain.

I remember learning Laos from a friend in Elementary school, the class boasting about the boy who was an artist, but also happened to be from Thialand. We walked in friends homes who spoke Spanish and didn’t think anything about the families who looked different or were a different socioeconomic class from ours….

If anything, as a child, we were fascinated with people who were different. There wasn’t the hate we see now days. Our country blended in harmony and just naturally glued itself together by love.

As a child, the world spun, and yet, we didn’t even know it. We didn’t need to google every question.

We just took for granted that a God, high in the heavens…the one we had learned about in Sunday School…owned the world, made creation, and was worthy of giving full credit and trust.

We drifted with peace, accepting, some parents had to work, others stayed home. Some kids have large families, others are only children.

And the child who had tragedy….and we all knew, at least one….they were loved and accepted, not outcast or reprimanded.

There was natural love and sympathy, compassion and kindness….

Until adults or anyone else, ever taught us to hate, compare, puff ourselves up, or scold people who came from anything other than love.

And then, somewhere along the way….

A seed of something dark poisoned our thinking. Maybe it was there all along? Maybe we’d missed it because we were young and ignorant?

Or maybe, the days just got darker, the world became more complicated, when we realized, in one click, we could see poverty in another nation….

Or identify with division or hate, that we were born with, but never really listened to or trusted before we saw it in another man.

And we got poisoned, I tell ya. Poisoned by the lies that we need information and complicated thinking. Complex and so much busi-ness….until we can’t even hear our own thoughts nowdays.

We can’t stop, or listen, or wait….or do anything without someone projecting their own ideas on us.

As a result, anxieties rise, stress, self-images, boasting at what we’ve done, instead of who another is as an individual.

And the stillness….the stillness to dream up a dance floor in the middle of a floor of toys, and spin wildly as if they have never been hurt, never seen pain, never experienced anything other than beauty and laughter, and joy….

Is a beautiful thing.

If I do one thing in motherhood. One thing as a parent, caring for mine or anyone else’s children?

It’s not to do more, give more, or even be more. It is just to let them dream. Let them be in a home where they can quiet their soul, grab a hold of their own inner peace and happiness….

It’s not to step in and rescue, but to step away and give space for their own stories to form and come to fruition…

In my “helping”, I never want to solve or fix, rescue or project anything I know or have gone through….

I just want to turn on the classics, make way for their own dance to lead them to their dreams and God’s promises.

I want them to spin at their own leisure, listen to their own music, become their own Piccasso, and change the world back to easy and simple…

Carefree and wonderful. Wild and glorious….

Whether they become soldiers one day or doctors the next….

Or find inside their dreams their own fierce, warrior-princess.

Yes, that would be perfect parenting to me.

To let be….children…who see….

Those things us adults too often seem to forget.

If you’ve ever been a child, or wish, like me, to turn the world back to simpler and easier, more uncomplicated days, take a moment to share this below. Just like hate, love ripples. And together, we can still have hope, still believe, we can make the world, by one small step, just a little better, more loving an carefree place.

Here’s to being a little child again, and letting our own children dream.