Home Is Where You Belong
The word “home” has a wonderful resonance. Home is where you belong. It is your shelter and place of rest, the place where you can be yourself. Nature offers wonderful images of home. It is fascinating in springtime to watch the birds build their nests. They gather the twigs and weave them into a nest. The floor and walls of the nest are padded with wool, moss, or fur. In the wall of a shed near my house, a swallow returns from Africa every year and finds her way back into the opening between the same two stones under the side wall. There she builds her nest and hatches out her young. No journey is too long when you are coming home. In Irish we say, “Níl aon tinnteán mar do thinnteán féin,” i.e., There is no hearth like the hearth at home.
There is such wisdom in Nature. Often it carries out its most miraculous work quietly under the veil of the ordinary. Sometimes we achieve the most wonderful things when we are not even aware of what we are doing. If we did know it, we might only paralyze ourselves and ruin the flow of natural creativity. If parents were fully aware of their effect, they could never act. If they could see the secret work of mind formation in the home and the harvest it will eventually bring, they could never achieve the neutrality that allows normal home life to happen in a natural way. Parents are generally wonderful people who give all their hearts and energy to the little people they have called into the universe. Parents must act in good faith—without excessive anxiety or self-rebuke. They must induct their children into the larger community.
Childhood as a Magic Forest
To a child, the parents are gods. Children are totally vulnerable. They are still only at the threshold of themselves. During your life on earth, childhood is the time of most intense happening. Yet ironically, it is also the most silent time in your life. You are having immense experiences of wonder, discovery, and difficulty, but the words and thoughts to name them have not yet arrived. This time of fermentation and change will influence so much of your later life, yet you have so little access to the integrating power of thoughts and words. Consequently, the depths of your experience as a child remain opaque. Childhood is a forest we never recognize while we are in it. Our minds and imagination and dreams constantly return there to explore the roots of our personality and presence. We try to unravel from the forest of first feelings and first events the secret of the patterns which have now become our second nature.
Childhood is an absolute treasure house of imagination. It is the forest of first encounters to which we can never again return. We have become too used to the world; wonder no longer animates us as it did then. There is so much that we can find out about the magic of our souls by revisiting these memories of first acquaintance. Never again do we experienceso directly and powerfully the surprise and the fresh tang of novelty. The forest of childhood is also the territory where our dreams, imagination, and images were first seeded. So much happened to us there under the canopy of innocence. It was only later that we could notice that the shadows were present too. The memory of childhood is so rich that it takes a lifetime to unpack. Again and again, we remember certain scenes, not always the most dramatic, and gradually come to a kind of self-understanding and an understanding of our parents. When we are as old as they were when we first knew them, whose face do we see in the mirror—ours or theirs?
The Belonging of Childhood
Innocence is precious and powerful. It is expected and acknowledged as a natural fact that a child is innocent. Yet innocence is more sophisticated than mere ignorance, lack of knowledge, or lack of experience. It is not accidental that the manner of our arrival in the universe is shrouded in innocence. This first innocence protects us from knowing the sinister negativity of life. It also immunizes us against recognition of how strange it is to be here, thrown into a world which is crowded with infinities of space, time, matter, and difference. It should be frightening to be a child in such a vast and unpredictable universe, but the little child never notices the danger directly. Innocence is a state of unknowing and the readiness to know. The wisdom of the human mind, especially in the child, ensures that knowing the world happens in stages. The innocence of childhood never breaks completely in one vast bright or dark epiphany. It only gives way gradually to new recognitions and experiences. Even when severe trauma occurs, it is somehow integrated; though it does deep damage, it still rarely extinguishes the flame of innocence. There is a poignant sense in which the child must keep its innocence alive in order to continue to grow and not allow the darkness to swamp its little mind. Innocence minds us. It only lets us become aware of what we are able to handle. Innocence permits the child to belong in the world. This is the secret of the child’s trust; it assumes that belonging is natural and sheltering. Experiments have shown that young children who have been thoroughly cautioned against the danger of strangers can still be coaxed and will walk off with a stranger in a public place while the parent is momentarily occupied. The innocence of childhood renews that of the parents and quickens their instinct to preserve it.
Innocence Keeps Mystery Playful
Innocence has a lyrical continuity. A child cannot turn it on and off. The fractures in innocence are partial. In different moments, thresholds are crossed into experience. Yet innocence manages to hold off the full recognition of how broken the human journey will be. The innocence of the child is its immediacy and nearness to everything. Rilke says that in all our subsequent life we will never again be as close to anything as we were to our toys in childhood. The toy becomes your friend and closest confidant. Before and below words, you invest the delight and concern of your heart in the toy. If you are clearing out an attic and you come across one of your old toys from childhood, it can release a flood of memories. The child lives in the neighbourhood of wonder where innocence keeps mystery playful. Each new event and encounter is all-absorbing. No overall perspective on life is available. The child lives in the house of discovery. The unconscious innocence of the child assembles new experiences. It is their cumulative gathering which eventually signals the end of childhood. Brick by brick, the house of innocence falls to ruins. Once that threshold into adulthood is crossed, one may never return again to the kingdom of innocence. Innocence always urges the child to explore and continues to pace and shelter this exploration until the child is finally adult and ready to stand alone in its new knowing. In contrast to how a child belongs in the world, adult belonging is never as natural, innocent, or playful. Adult belonging has to be chosen, received, and renewed. It is a lifetime’s work.
Childhood experience is deeply infused with longing. The adventure of being here is utterly engaging. There is longing to explore, to play, and to discover. Because the sense and contour of the self are only coming into definition, the child’s sense of longing is largely unrefined. This is often evident in the way children play with each other. Their play is never merely chaotic. It is inevitably governed by self-conscious and elaborate rules which they stipulate. Perhaps these delineate safe zones in which new experience becomes possible.
The Longing of Childhood Is Akin to Dream
The imagination of early childhood has no limits. This is why children are fascinated by stories. A story has permission to go anywhere. Its characters can have any powers and do anything they like. The child rarely experiences the story as an observer. The child enters the story, experiencing its drama from within. Often a child will explicitly ask to be included as one of the characters in a story: “Which am I, Daddy?” The wonder and imagination of the child are awakened and engaged. Perhaps the shape of story fascinates the child, because it takes the child’s longing to wild and dangerous frontiers where it cannot go in its day-to-day life. The story allows the child to act with a power and strength which are impossible in the limitation of its present little body. Anything and everything is possible in a story. The longing of the child lives in the realm of pure possibility. All doors are open. All barriers are down. Because it is a story with a beginning, middle, and end, it offers a form of belonging in which the full adventure of longing can be explored. Narrative is a dramatic form of continuity created by longing, and it is also a place where human desire can come home. Great stories retain resonance because they embody the “immortal longings” of the heart; our longing to enter them comes from the child-like side of our hearts.