Anam Cara

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?