Reclaiming Childhood Wonder

When I was little girl, I sang to the wind, and the wind sang back. . . . . .

I would play in the yard and let whatever sound was in me carry into the wind. The trees would lean. The breeze would shift against my neck. The adults smiled and called it imagination. They were being generous. What they meant was that I would grow out of it.

I knew, even then, that they were wrong about what was happening. I did not have the language for what I knew , I was four, maybe five, but my body was keeping a record my mind had not yet been taught to dismiss. The grass under my feet, the air moving through my voice, the light shifting across my skin: none of it was separate from me. I belonged to it. The world answered because I was part of the world.

Then I was taught otherwise.

When Wonder Gets Buried

Then I was taught otherwise.

In rooms that prized logic over instinct, I learned to fold that part of me away. Wonder was renamed distraction. Sensitivity was renamed fragility. The correction was almost always kind. There were a few scars, of course. But no one set out to break me. The system did. The system kept asking me to conform in ways I could not, and the repeated failure to fit it did its own quieter work.

But here’s the thing . . . . . . …. . [ the body remembered anyways ]

The Dialogue Never Really Ends

What no one told me, and what I am only beginning to understand now, is that the body keeps its own record regardless of what the mind agrees to forget. Long after I stopped singing, some part of me held onto the cadence. Sun on skin. The intelligence of watching a matter grow, decay, and return again. These were not memories I chose. They kept themselves. They were the proof, quiet and constant, that there is a knowing which arrives before thought and reaches further than words and that the conversation I once had with the wind had never actually ended. I had only stopped speaking.

To return to it now is not to become a child again. It is to admit that the child was not wrong. She was practicing a form of intimacy with the living world that most of us are taught, one classroom at a time, to call by hurtful names. Her naivety understood that to be alive is to be in relationship. That noticing is its own form of devotion. That the self is not a thing carried within us, but something that forms in the space between us and everything else.

Your body remembers too. What dialogue is it waiting for you to pick up again?