Childhood

I miss my childhood.
Sure, I still have a hold of it in one sense. I think nothing of dancing around in my room like a crazy person, or presenting pictures to my mother because I'm proud I accomplished something. I think nothing of licking bowls and I think nothing of telling my dogs epic stories of my day and conversing with them, because honestly there are times where I know they understand me. True story.
But it's hard to say I have a full hold of it. There are things that I can trace to my childhood - my love of anything messy, my love of words, my sheer insanity and my love for the people (which, thanks Chris, you're destroying that) - but does that really capture childhood? In childhood, I was my mother's and my father's, and I knew that beyond anything else. That, even as I got all levels of angry towards my father, he would do whatever he could to protect me, and that even as brusque as my mother was, she'd also throw herself in front of anything to protect me.
In childhood, if I was good, I got juice and I got things of love. If my clothes had holes that were gaping or my belly was showing too much and I had ankles gaping from under my jeans, I'd be hauled to Target or wherever.

But now, it's Tash the working girl, as my mother calls it. Tomorrow I start at 7am, finish at 7pm, for a day full of uni and work shenanigans.
And the way I get my juice? It's if I factor in electricity bills, rent,  food, things to survive. Then I may be lucky and run away with two Snickers bars. But more often than not I don't get that lucky.
Today I got an internship with Discerning Bride magazine, and I spent my time oohing and aahing over dresses that are $7000 each. I can't imagine having that much money to ever spend on a dress, and I sure as all heck wouldn't ask my parents to pay. I mean, my mother at the moment has to have an operation. $30000 it's going to cost her. Thirty thousand. I mean, really, adulthood, you seem bleak.

Tonight, I wrote on Facebook:

I can hear a child outside singing an off-key and completely out of tune version of Happy Birthday, and I long for the days where I too did that with wild abandon.

The child sounded so happy. So besotted with life. Just knowing it was there, and that life was something to be celebrated. I couldn't tell how old he was. But he was young enough to not be tainted.
My friend Tamara commented.

Why don't you? What is stopping you?

And what's stopping me is the idea of perfection to be attained. In childhood, it was okay. My parents would love me no matter how stupid I sounded singing. I remember singing a song about a cut I got from a vegetable peeler to my mother and a tape recorder. It was ridiculous, because I made up words as I went along and essentially the entire thing would've worked just by telling her, but I had to sing it.
And she applauded me and gave me a biscuit.

The thing is, I guess this also links back to my ideas of spirituality. As a child, I understood so fully that there had to be Someone out there, who cared for us. I knew without a doubt that God was there. And then in the world, with people constantly dissing my faith, I feel more confused about this. As an adult, I find I'm more responsive to the world's ideas than I ever was as a child. At uni, we were discussing this concept. Are children more perceptive to the world? Are children vessels to be filled, and do we get the underlying gritty notions that people try to sneak into our lives?
I don't think so. Not as much. When I was a child, I could look at something and immediately decide my feelings on it. Now I find myself going, "Cynicism says I shouldn't trust it, and the world says the same, the world discounts my feelings and I'm an adult now, whatever I do means I have to look after it myself".

This is a stupid way to live.
Don't catch yourself thinking like that, because you know what happens? You end up feeling overwhelmed. You end up writing 1000 word essays to your best friend, wondering where the heck everything went to. You end up writing extremely didactic blog posts (sorry, guys). I ran out onto the balcony just before, yelled out to my brother at the top of my lungs that I loved him, and waved like a maniac. Why? Because I could. Because it felt right.
And sometimes you've got to go with those kiddish instincts, above anything else. We're pure then, and the fog isn't permanently in our faces.

I think ending with Wordsworth is appropriate. The guy is literary movements apart from me, and dead and gone, but the power of these words makes me happy. I studied this poem last year as a part of my Extension 1 English Romanticism module, as a related text. I could deconstruct it for you, but I won't, because the poem works best when you just read it and take in exactly what he's saying. Flowery language and all, it makes sense. This is Intimations of Immortality.

THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.	5
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
The rainbow comes and goes,	10
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;	15
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth.
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound	20
As to the tabor's sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;	25
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the echoes through the mountains throng,
The winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea	30
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every beast keep holiday;—
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy	35
Shepherd-boy!
Ye blessèd creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,	40
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.
O evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,	45
And the children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the babe leaps up on his mother's arm:—	50
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
—But there's a tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have look'd upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The pansy at my feet	55
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,	60
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come	65
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,	70
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;	75
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a mother's mind,	80
And no unworthy aim,
The homely nurse doth all she can
To make her foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.	85
Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years' darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!	90
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learnèd art;
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;	95
And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long	100
Ere this be thrown aside,
And with new joy and pride
The little actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his 'humorous stage'
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,	105
That Life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy soul's immensity;	110
Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,—
Mighty prophet! Seer blest!	115
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a master o'er a slave,	120
A presence which is not to be put by;
To whom the grave
Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight
Of day or the warm light,
A place of thought where we in waiting lie;	125
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?	130
Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!
O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,	135
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest—	140
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:—
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;	145
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,	150
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,	155
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,	160
To perish never:
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!	165
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,	170
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
Then sing, ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
And let the young lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound!	175
We in thought will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts to-day
Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was once so bright	180
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;	185
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,	190
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
And O ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquish'd one delight	195
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripp'd lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;	200
The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,	205
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

And now I'm going to sing some Gyroscope and remind myself that God's the only one who's going to hear me sing. And He'll love it, because I'm happy.

Go do the same (but don't sing Gyroscope! THAT'S MY SONG!)