Ehan sat down with a sheet of paper and the kind of seriousness only children can bring to small things. His fingers worked patiently, folding, pressing, adjusting, beginning again where needed. To anyone else, it may have looked like a child making a paper aeroplane.
But it never feels that small when you watch closely.
There is something sacred in the way children make things. They do not merely fold paper. They give it a future. In their hands, an ordinary sheet begins to carry direction, hope, experiment, and flight. Before the aeroplane has even left the ground, it has already travelled somewhere in the mind.
That is what moved me as I watched him.
Those little hands were not just playing. They were imagining. Measuring. Believing. They were taking something flat and fragile and asking it to become something that could move through the air.
Maybe that is what all of us keep trying to do in life.
We take what is simple, what is available, what is lying quietly before us and we try to shape it into something that can fly.
A child does this naturally. An adult spends years trying to remember how.
And so I keep these moments carefully. Small domestic scenes. Quiet acts of wonder. The unnoticed workshops of childhood. This blog has slowly become a museum for such things, a place where paper aeroplanes are not just paper aeroplanes, but evidence that imagination is still alive in the world.
Today, it lived on the floor, between soft light and folded paper, in the hands of a little boy preparing something for flight.
By the way, did you know that I’m actively writing in malayalam also these days. Find them here. I’ve written a small book as well if you’re into that. If you like listening to stuff, do scroll through the selection of podcasts. If you’ve time, have a look at the visuals I’ve made. Grateful for your moment here. Keep coming back here : )
On one small square of paper, a red figure stands upright.
Large black eyes. A curved smile. Long grey legs. Arms slightly open. Underneath, in careful uneven letters, he has written spiderman.
On another square, separate but somehow connected, there is a boat.
Just a curved outline, dark circles inside, floating in white space.
He told me it’s a boat.
That is all.
No sea. No sky. No buildings. No villains. No waves.
Just a hero and a boat.
And I keep thinking about it.
When children draw heroes, they strip them down to their essence. There is no dramatic pose, no web shooting between towers, no muscular definition. The hero is simply upright. Present. Smiling.
Strength, to a child, is not aggression. It is not complexity. It is not burdened by backstory.
It is colour. It is stance. It is kindness.
And then there is the boat.
A boat is trust in motion.
You only draw a boat if you believe something can be crossed.
Water is not even visible here. The page is empty. But the boat exists anyway. Which means the ocean is assumed. Imagined. Felt.
That might be the most profound part.
We adults demand to see the entire map before we move. We want the sea drawn, the weather forecasted, the coordinates fixed. Children do not. They draw the vessel first. They assume the crossing is possible.
And look at the relationship between the two drawings.
Spiderman is not inside the boat.
He stands beside it.
It is as if courage and journey are separate but related. One is identity. The other is movement.
You must first stand upright in who you are before you step into what carries you forward.
Or maybe the boat is him.
And the hero is who he believes he can become.
Or maybe the hero stays on shore while the boat ventures into the unknown.
There is something deeply tender in the white space around both sketches. He did not feel the need to fill it. He is not anxious about emptiness. The world does not have to be fully constructed for meaning to exist.
A hero can stand in unfinished space. A boat can float on an unseen sea.
That is faith.
As adults, we clutter our pages. We add backgrounds, narratives, defenses. We armour our heroes and weigh down our boats. Somewhere along the way, we stopped smiling in our own drawings.
But here, on two small pieces of paper, courage is simple.
Stand tall. Smile. Trust the vessel. Leave room for the ocean you cannot yet see.
Maybe that is all life ever asks of us.
And maybe a child understands that long before we do.
By the way, did you know that I’m actively writing in malayalam also these days. Find them here. I’ve written a small book as well if you’re into that. If you like listening to stuff, do scroll through the selection of podcasts. If you’ve time, have a look at the visuals I’ve made
Not dramatically. Not with thunder or rain or a storm that announces itself. It simply softened. The towers dissolved into milk. The horizon folded into silence. Even the usual certainty of edges… buildings, roads, distance.. was gone.
And there he stood.
Between two white curtains, in his blue slippers, looking out at a world that refused to show itself.
There is something about fog in late February here. It feels like a pause before the furnace doors open. Before the air thickens. Before summer claims the sky for months. This is the last stretch of gentleness. The last mornings where the city exhales cool breath.
He doesn’t know that yet.
To him, this is just mystery.
Children stand differently in front of fog. Adults look for clarity. We want outlines. We want to know what is behind it. We check the weather app. We think about traffic delays. We measure inconvenience.
But he simply watches.
He is not frustrated that he cannot see the skyline. He is not trying to solve the fog. He is letting it be.
And I wonder when we lose that.
When did we begin to resist what is unclear? When did we start needing visibility as a condition for peace?
Fog is an honest teacher. It tells you: you will not see far today. Walk anyway.
Life has seasons like this city. There are months of sharp clarity where everything feels defined and bright. And then there are mornings like this. Soft. Uncertain. Edges blurred. The future standing just beyond a veil.
Before summer sets in.
There is tenderness in that phrase. Before the intensity. Before the tests. Before the long stretch of heat that asks more of you than you think you have.
This morning felt like mercy.
He stood there quietly, his small silhouette framed by white, staring into a sky that had erased the world. And I thought: maybe this is what trust looks like in its purest form.
To stand at the edge of what you cannot see. To not panic. To not rush. To simply watch.
Dubai will return by noon. The fog will lift. The buildings will reappear as if nothing happened.
But for a brief early hour in late February, the city remembered how to be gentle.
And he was there to witness it.
By the way, did you know that I’m actively writing in malayalam also these days. Find them here. I’ve written a small book as well if you’re into that. If you like listening to stuff, do scroll through the selection of podcasts. If you’ve time, have a look at the visuals I’ve made. And please come back soon : )
I opened it the way one opens a drawer of old letters, not looking for anything in particular, but expecting to feel something.
Inside, a small white card with “Nasna” written in thick, uneven black strokes. A red glitter heart. A larger green one. A tiny brown dinosaur walking toward a purple egg as if it knows something we don’t. Underneath, scraps of paper. “Chocolate” written in bold innocence. A small container of glow gel. Random memos. Torn edges. Nothing arranged. Everything important.
Children don’t curate. They keep.
That box is not storage. It is evidence. Of what caught his attention. Of what he thought was worth saving. Of what love looks like when it has no language yet.
The way he wrote Nasna was not perfectly centered, not carefully measured, but certain. Certain enough to glue a heart next to it. Certain enough to decorate it with a dinosaur, because in his world love and dinosaurs belong on the same line. There is no hierarchy in a child’s mind. A mother. A heart. A prehistoric creature. Chocolate. Glow gel. All equally sacred.
I sometimes think we lose this democracy of importance as we grow up.
We begin to rank things. Salary above sunsets. Inbox above intimacy. Deadlines above drawings. We stop putting glitter hearts next to names. We stop saving scraps. We throw away what cannot be justified.
But in that box, nothing needed justification.
I noticed something else. The box itself. It was once a chocolate box. Something meant to be consumed and discarded. Now it holds permanence. It has been opened and closed many times. This is not a one time archive. It is a living museum. He goes back to it. Re enters old fascinations. Revisits yesterday’s treasures as if they still breathe.
When was the last time I revisited my own treasures like that. Not achievements. Not certificates. But small proofs of affection. Handwritten names. Uneven letters. Silly combinations that made sense only in that moment.
There is a kind of theology inside a child’s box. It says nothing beautiful is too small to keep. Nothing loved is too trivial to preserve.
Maybe that is the real inheritance children give their parents. Not toys scattered across the floor. Not noise in the evenings. But a reminder. A reminder that meaning is handmade. That value is assigned by the heart, not the market. That memory does not ask for perfection. It only asks to be noticed.
Today, I closed the box gently. Not because I was done exploring, but because I understood something.
He is building memory in fragments.
One day the handwriting will straighten. The dinosaurs will disappear. The glitter hearts will look embarrassing. But this box will remain as proof that there was once a boy who believed his mother’s name deserved decoration. That chocolate deserved bold letters. That love could be glued together with craft paper.
And maybe my task is simple.
To make sure he never fully loses that instinct. To quietly recover some of it for myself.
Because as I closed that old chocolate box today, I realized something.
This is what I have been trying to build here all along.
Not of achievements. Not of polished thoughts. But of fragments. Of feelings caught before they disappear. Of names written in uneven ink. Of moments that would otherwise be thrown away by the adult world.
If his box holds glitter hearts and dinosaurs, this blog holds the grown up equivalents. Questions. Reflections. Confessions. Small awakenings.
He curates with glue and craft paper.
I curate with words.
And maybe this space becomes a museum too. For all of us.
A place where nothing beautiful is too small to keep.
By the way, did you know that I’m actively writing in malayalam also these days. Find them here.
My son is pressed toward the oval window like it is a secret portal the world forgot to lock.
There is something holy about the way children look outside an airplane. Not curious in the noisy way adults are curious. Not trying to capture it, not trying to explain it, not trying to turn it into proof. He is simply there, leaning into the light, letting the sky arrive in him without resistance.
The cabin around us is a small mechanical universe. Plastic edges. A screen that knows how to entertain. Trays and latches and polite instructions. Everything is designed to make travel efficient, controlled, predictable. Yet his gaze refuses that architecture. His eyes keep returning to the one soft, ancient element that cannot be managed: open space.
This is what moves me.
Because I realise how much of adulthood is spent building inner cabins. We create routines, boundaries, strategies. We learn to fold ourselves into seats that fit. We learn to keep our feet within the lines. We learn to be useful, to be correct, to be timely. Over time, even wonder becomes scheduled. Even joy gets a slot between meetings.
But my son has not learned any of that yet. He does not know the weight of deadlines. He does not know the silent negotiations inside a grown man’s chest. He does not know the language of worry that adults speak fluently without moving their lips. He has not inherited the habit of looking at the world and immediately asking, “What does this mean for me?”
He only looks.
And in that looking, he reminds me of something I keep misplacing.
That the world is not a problem to solve. It is a presence to meet.
When I watch him, I begin to understand the window as more than a piece of glass. It is a border. Not the kind that separates countries, but the kind that separates states of being. On one side, a child who still belongs to the wide open. On the other, a parent who is always tempted to reduce the wide open into plans and precautions.
The window is also a mirror, if I let it be. I see my own life as a sequence of departures.
Leaving childhood without knowing I was leaving it.
Leaving friends with the confidence that time would wait.
Leaving places I swore I would return to, then discovering that return is never a perfect circle. You go back, but you are not the same person. The streets are familiar, but your inner weather has changed.
Maybe that is what travel really does. It does not merely move our bodies across distances. It exposes how often our hearts live in the wrong time zone.
My son, meanwhile, is perfectly timed.
He looks out at a sky that offers no promises. No fences. No signboards. Only a vast, indifferent beauty. And he is not intimidated by it. He does not ask the sky to shrink into something comfortable. He does not demand that it be useful. He simply allows it to be enormous.
I envy that. I need that.
Because there is a quiet fear adults carry, even when everything is fine. A fear that life is slipping forward faster than we can hold it. That our children are growing in increments too small to notice, until one day a voice deepens, a hand becomes larger than ours, and the doorway suddenly looks different because they are almost tall enough to leave.
In this moment, his legs are stretched toward the seat in front, shoes slightly too big for his small frame, as if even his body is practicing for the future. I want to freeze time, not because I am unhappy with what is coming, but because I am stunned by how quickly love evolves. It begins as protection. It becomes guidance. Then one day, it becomes a blessing you give from a distance.
Parenthood with all my imperfectness is the art of holding and releasing at the same time.
Maybe that is why this scene pierces me. This is not just my son looking out at clouds. This is my heart rehearsing the day he will look out at the world without me sitting beside him. The day he will be the one in motion, and I will be the one waving from the ground, pretending my smile is enough.
Yet I also feel something gentler beneath the ache.
Gratitude.
That I get to witness this version of him.
That I get to sit close enough to hear his quiet breathing while the world rearranges itself outside.
That I get to learn, again and again, from someone who has not yet been trained to doubt beauty.
I do not know what he is thinking as he looks out. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Perhaps he is not thinking at all, only receiving. And perhaps that is the highest form of intelligence we forget as we grow older: the ability to be moved without needing to own the reason.
The sky will not remember this flight. The clouds will not keep our names.
But I will remember this.
The small head turned toward light.
The way wonder can live in a seatbelt.
The way a child can turn a simple window into a doorway back to what is true.
And as the plane continues forward, I make a quiet promise to myself.
To not rush past moments like this.
To let his wonder educate my tired adulthood.
To look out more often, even when there is no window.
Because sometimes, the most profound journeys are not the miles we travel, but the return we make to a gaze that is still capable of awe.
Not a tower. Not a building. Not a stack of colours. A ladder house. As if the most important part of a home is not the walls or the roof, but the way you move between levels. As if living is simply climbing, step by step, from one little world to the next.
These days, as I’ve written in some other post as well, I try to explore the “inner world” he creates.
I found this one the way I often find his quietest work. Not presented. Not announced. Just left behind, like a small pebble on a path, waiting for someone who knows how to notice.
A soft green sheet, curled slightly at the edges, resting against a dark surface. In the centre, a shape made of thick crayon strokes, layered like slices of something warm. Pink at the top. Yellow beside it, bright and open. A brown curve holding one side like a protective shoulder. A bold green strip cutting across the middle, steady as a floor beam. Then the blue, the part my eyes kept returning to. Blue lines pressed in a row, like steps, like rungs. Under that, orange, then purple, then a red curve at the bottom that feels like an arm, or a door, or the last room where you keep your secrets.
It is not a house the way adults draw houses. There is no triangle roof. No square windows. No stick people smiling under a sun in the corner.
But I know, with a certainty that is hard to explain, that this is a house.
Because children do not draw what they see. They draw what they mean.
A ladder house is not built to impress anyone from the street. It is built for someone who lives inside. It is built for a mind that understands home as layers. Some bright, some dark, some loud, some quiet. Some you climb into with excitement. Some you climb into slowly, holding the sides, careful not to fall.
When he says ladder house, I hear more than a name. I hear a theory of belonging.
In a ladder house, you cannot stay in one room forever. You must move. You must rise. You must return. You must learn which step creaks, which step is safe, which step you can jump over when you are brave.
It makes me think about how he experiences his days.
A child’s day has levels too. Morning is one floor. School is another. Play is another. Hunger is a floor with its own laws. Sleep is the highest floor, where the world becomes soft and everyone else finally becomes quiet.
And maybe, in his inner language, the blue part is the ladder. The only thing that truly connects the whole structure. Without it, the colours would be separate. With it, they become a single place.
I look at the way he pressed the blue, line after line, and I imagine the patience it took. The decision to repeat a shape until it feels right. The small seriousness of his hand. That kind of effort is its own form of love, even when it is not meant for anyone.
There is a tenderness in the materials too. Crayon on green paper, nothing precious, nothing framed. A child does not wait for perfect paper. He uses what is near. He does not worry about permanence. He just makes the thing, and then moves on.
Adults live the opposite way.
We postpone. We plan. We tell ourselves we will begin when we have better time, better tools, better conditions, better versions of ourselves. Children begin in the middle of ordinary life. They begin with what they have. Their courage is practical.
This ladder house reminded me of that.
It also reminded me of how a child builds meaning from colours long before he builds meaning from words. Pink can be a roof. Yellow can be a room where someone laughs. Brown can be safety. Green can be the line that holds everything together. Purple can be the quiet place you go when you do not want to be asked questions.
And red, that red at the bottom, feels like the part you touch last. The part that carries weight. The part that meets the ground.
It is easy to underestimate a drawing like this, because it does not explain itself in adult terms. But a child’s art is often a kind of map. Not a map of streets, but a map of feelings.
If this is a house, then it is a house made of moods.
And if it is a ladder house, then it is a house that assumes you will change as you climb.
I keep thinking about that assumption.
Children believe in change without calling it growth. They believe the next level exists because they have already lived it a thousand times in play. Today a chair is a mountain. Tomorrow it is a ship. Later it is a cave. Nothing stays fixed. Everything is allowed to become something else.
A ladder house is built on that faith.
Maybe that is why it moved me more than I expected. Because somewhere along the way, many of us forget that home can be made like this. Not as a finished structure, but as a living stack. Something you keep building, colour by colour, step by step.
There is also something quietly comforting in the way he centred the whole thing. As if he knows, even at his age, that a house needs a heart. That a life needs a centre.
The edges of the paper are curled, imperfect, like any day in a real family. But the ladder house stands there anyway, held together by intention. It does not apologise for being odd. It does not try to look like the houses in books. It simply exists as itself.
And maybe that is the gift he gives me without knowing.
A reminder that the world does not have to look familiar to be true.
A reminder that a home is not only where you live. A home is also what you make in secret, when nobody is watching, when your hand is free, when your mind is quietly arranging colours into meaning.
He calls it ladder house.
I will probably remember that phrase for a long time.
Because it sounds like something we all need. A place where you can climb. A place where each step leads to another room inside you. A place where the colours do not have to match, as long as they belong.
Tonight, I will keep this little green sheet somewhere safe.
Not because it is a masterpiece.
Because it is a window.
And because, for a moment, it let me stand at the edge of his world and look in.
I may come again with another of Ehan’s art piece. Yes, I’m obsessed! =)
Last night, after the lights were off and the house had settled into its quiet, I did my usual small thing. I went to the corner where my son Ehan keeps his papers and toys.
Not the ones we save neatly. Not the ones with dates and folders and proud labels. I mean the loose ones. The scraps. The half torn pages with pencil marks that stop mid thought. The ones a child forgets the moment he begins living the next moment.
When he falls asleep and when I clean his toys and his drawings, I always do look through what he left behind. Not to judge. Not to correct. Just to see where he went while I was busy being an adult. It feels like finding footprints after someone has walked through a room you thought you knew.
And in the middle of that pile, I found this.
A piece of lined paper, torn at the edges, still holding the softness of being handled. Pencil lines, confident in some places, uncertain in others. A shape I recognized before I fully understood what I was looking at.
My logo.
Or rather, his version of my logo.
He had drawn a figure, a face shaped like an oval, a single dot for an eye, and around it, rings and curves like a boundary drawn again and again. As if he was not satisfied with one outline. As if the border needed to be repeated, thickened, protected. Then, inside the shape, he wrote the words in his own handwriting. Or probably he got interested in the “borders” I had designed around the head in the book cover to symbolize the “inner world”
THE BORDER MIND
Not perfect. Not complete. Missing a word. A little smudged where his pencil pressed too hard. The letters slightly leaning, like they were walking. The kind of writing that does not care about alignment, only meaning.
I don’t know about you, but I am the kind of person who melt with things like this.
Because I did not ask him to do this. I did not sit him down and say, draw my website logo. I did not even tell him it mattered to me. I did not point at it and explain branding or design or identity. I simply lived near that logo, the way adults live near their own ideas, and somehow he noticed. Somehow, it entered his small world without a ceremony.
There is something almost unsettling about that, in a beautiful way.
A child sees everything.
Not in the sharp, analytical way we imagine when we talk about observation. He sees in a quiet, soaking way. Like cloth left in water. He absorbs what is around him, and then one day it appears again in a form you did not expect.
I have spent time choosing that logo. Thinking about what it should hold. What it should hint at. How it should sit beside the title, The Border of a Mind, without explaining itself too much. I wanted it to feel like a silhouette at the edge of thought. A person turned slightly away….
Ehan did not see any of that, and still he caught something true.
His drawing has a kind of honesty that no polished version can reach. The figure in his sketch looks less like a brand and more like a person. A person inside a shape. A person inside a boundary. A person surrounded by lines, as if thought itself has layers.
Maybe that is what a mind feels like to him. Not a clean outline, but a space inside spaces.
The part that moved me most was not the resemblance. It was the intention. The act of copying, which is never really copying. Children do not duplicate. They translate.
He took what he saw and brought it into his own language. A pencil. A small hand. A page torn from whatever notebook was nearest. And then he gave it back to me, without knowing he was giving anything back.
When I picked up that paper while cleaning the cupboard, I had the strange feeling of holding a message.
Not a message written to me directly. Not a note that says, I love you, or I am proud of you. Children rarely speak in those straight lines. Their messages come sideways. In drawings left under a chair. In a song hummed from the back seat. In a sentence spoken while they are half asleep, when their guard is down and the world is soft.
This one came in pencil, and it said something like, I see you.
It is easy, as parents, to feel unseen.
We are present all day and still feel invisible. We pack food, tie shoelaces, answer questions, wipe spills, carry bags, carry feelings, carry time. We give so much that we forget our inner life exists outside our responsibilities. Sometimes even our own work begins to feel like a thing happening in the background, not quite real.
And then a child quietly reaches into that background and pulls something forward.
Look, he seems to say. This is part of you. I noticed.
Of course, he did not say those words. He is still a child. He will not frame it like that. If I ask him tomorrow, he might shrug. He might laugh. He might say he was bored. He might run away before I can even ask.
But the paper says it anyway.
The borders we speak about as adults often sound dramatic. Borders of identity. Borders of language. Borders of belonging. Borders between who we are at work and who we are at home. Borders between the self we show and the self we hide.
Ehan lives inside a different set of borders.
His borders are drawn in pencil and erased with a palm. His borders are emotional. The border between being brave and being afraid can change in five minutes. The border between tears and laughter is thin. The border between imagination and reality is not a wall, it is a door that swings both ways.
And yet, here he is, drawing borders around a figure and writing my title inside it.
It made me wonder what he thinks this thing is, this website, this work that takes my attention sometimes. Does he imagine it as a place. Does he think it lives somewhere physical. Does he think it is a person. Does he think it is mine, or ours.
Maybe to him, The Border of a Mind is not an idea. Maybe it is simply a part of the house, like a chair or a cup. Something he sees me return to. Something he senses has weight, even if he cannot name the weight.
There is a particular tenderness in the way children mirror us.
Not the mirror that shows your face. The mirror that shows your life.
They reflect back what you repeat, what you carry, what you return to when nobody is watching. They do not reflect your speeches. They reflect your patterns.
I keep looking at his spelling, THE BORDER MIND, and I keep smiling.
He left out a word, and somehow it still feels right. Maybe even truer, in a child’s way. A border. A mind. Two things next to each other. No explanation. No linking phrase. Just the two nouns standing side by side, like two strangers who already understand each other.
For me, this is very valuable.
I know this. One day, when he is older, this scrap of paper will matter in a way he cannot guess. It will remind him that there was a time he drew what he saw, without fear of being wrong. It will remind me that my work was quietly witnessed by the smallest person in the room.
And for me, right now, it is a gentle kind of proof.
Proof that a child is always paying attention. Proof that what we build in silence can still be felt. Proof that love sometimes arrives without words, folded into a torn piece of lined paper, hidden among the ordinary debris of a day.
A small hand drew my logo while I was not looking.
And in doing so, he drew a line straight into my heart.
This is more like a diary to myself. Today is the day my three-year-old had his first outdoor ride on his tiny bike, pedaling beside the shimmering waters. Childlike laughter ringing out, mingling with the distant city’s hum. Sunlight danced on gentle waves and sparkling eyes discovering the joy and thrill of cycling. Despite the thick humidity clinging our skin, every discomfort melted away in that radiant moment. We’d stroll hand in hand beforehand, their little fingers wrapped in mine with boundless trust. Each wobble and triumphant balance attested to their courage blooming. May their road unfurl as beautifully limitless as the waters at our feet. May be, this’ll come back to me as a nostalgic memory later when he asks the key for my car.
I recently read that here’s something truly enchanting about being invited into a child’s world. I am in that brief fleeting span of my life now where I am blessed to have my 3 year old around. A child’s world is truly beautiful. It’s a realm where imagination reigns supreme, unbound by adult logic or real-world constraints. In this magical space, teddy bears spring to life, cardboard boxes transform into intergalactic spaceships, and ordinary cups hold mysterious potions with extraordinary powers. The way children perceive their surroundings is refreshingly honest and open, filled with endless possibilities that adults often overlook. Their unbridled curiosity leads to questions that can challenge our own understanding of the world, making us reconsider things we’ve long taken for granted. Childhood is a fleeting period, a brief window where reality and fantasy intertwine seamlessly. Colors seem brighter, adventures more thrilling, and everyday objects hold infinite potential. Time moves differently here – a few minutes can stretch into hours of imaginative play, while entire afternoons slip by in the blink of an eye. Those precious moments spent in a child’s world can be surprisingly freeing. They offer a chance to see life through a different lens, reminding us of the wonder we once felt at simple discoveries. In this space, creativity flourishes, unhampered by practicality or skepticism. While we can’t remain in this world forever, these glimpses into childhood’s vibrant imagination can leave lasting impressions, rekindling our own sense of wonder and possibility.
While playing with my son, these days I tend to notice how him at play becomes completely enraptured and absorbed in the present moment. With pure, unclouded fascination, they fully immerse themselves in the sheer bliss and wonder of whatever captures their interest and imagination. As adults, we too often lose touch with that innocent capacity for soul-reverent joy and presence. Our daily routines and obligations cast a sort of seriousness trance over us, causing us to forget the soul-igniting passions and curiosities that once set our hearts afire. We start listening more to the voices of duty, fear and resignation rather than the spontaneous movements of our own authentic enthusiasm and excitement. We resign ourselves to lives of quiet desperation, sacrificing our deepest aliveness on the altars of conformity and responsibility. Yet our callings, our most vibrant soul-seedlings, lie patiently waiting to be revived and nourished.
They never truly abandon us, but rather remain as smoldering embers within, hoping to be stoked by the breath of our loving attunement once again. Just as a bonfire needs an endless supply of fuel to stay alight, our souls require the continual kindling of pursuits that impassion us and spark our unique creative genius. When we withhold that sustenance by disregarding or denying our true joys, we slowly dim our radiance and inner luster as beings. A chance encounter with a book, a piece of music, a work of art or even just the play of light through a forest’s canopy can be the spark that breathes life into the embers of our long-suppressed inspiration. From there, simply staying in intimate regard with that ignited passion and serving it with wholehearted devotion will cause it to blaze with increasing intensity. For consciousness ever follows the tenor of our deepest interests and prayerful pursuits. What we most revere and adore, we become. So if your life currently feels extinguished and monochrome, like a dead campfire’s ashen greys, cease looking outside yourself for the perfect set of reigniting circumstances. Simply turn your gaze inward and ask your heart “What rekindles my joy and childlike awe of existence? What activities and interests resuscitate me with their thrillingly alive textures of being?” Then follow those clues relentlessly down their luminous trails, allowing each encounter with beauty, intrigue, and breathtaking mystery to refuel your soul’s ascendant resurrection fires. For as you do, you’ll burn away the soot of accumulated fears and stale stories to rebirth yourself into the radiant, infinitely faceted shape of your most wild and rapturous essence.
