Let yourself dream. 

Vivian. Her pigtails could not be cuter. She laughs often and it sounds like stars twinkling. Lighting up the sky.  ‘Let yourself dream,’ I implore her. I never want her to feel caged. I want her to feel free and open to dreams and fantasies and love languages. Her imagination is wild and open, like a mustang running full speed ahead, clouds of dirt soaring behind it, reaching heights that she’ll never see because her aim is certain. ‘Ask me anything,’ I invite. She asks about the distant past, the origins of knowing. ‘How old are you?’ I query, almost as a reflex, and i realize that she doesn’t know and neither do i. What a silly question for us to ask children, arrogantly assuming that the number of years lived on this planet, in this incarnation, means anything as far as wisdom is concerned. This soul of hers, it’s learned before. It’s felt and explored and deepened before. Open wide to experience, the enlightenment of childhood is inspiring. 

Before the spark dims, around age 10 or 11, we are free to burn. Then, for some reason, it becomes natural to compare and contrast, to please and attempt to meet expectations. Most of us stop running full speed ahead in our imaginary worlds. The dust doesn’t fly so high behind our hooves. If we allow ourselves to run at all, it’s at best a little trot, and then we give ourselves a half smile, ‘that was a fun little jaunt.’ ‘That wasn’t a jaunt, that was an awkward wiggle,’ a child would say if they saw us fidgeting with our imaginations. Notice the breaks, the self-imposed stop signs, the avoidance of judgment. The cages we’ve put around our mustangs because it seemed like the responsible thing to do. The great thing about imagination is that there’s no responsibility to be had, except to surrender to the wildness of it all.