My Midnight Thoughts

I apologize for the lack of blogging. I just started the semester and figuring out my new schedule has been kind of difficult for me. So, here I find myself at midnight with a spare moment to blog about what's on my mind. Don't worry, no heavy politics here. I'm off the stuff. ;)

What's been on my mind recently has been the idea of the innocence of childhood. There are a couple reasons for this: 1) I am taking an amazingly interesting class on Race and Minority groups and we've been talking about the honesty of children, and 2) I feel that I am extremely naive because when I talk to other people about issues in the world today, I am just concerned that we are being nice to one another. I feel like a little kid when I think "well, that's just plain not nice!" Not that I posses the innocence of a child, but sometimes I feel like one.

In my class we are reading a book by a man named Wendell Berry called The Hidden Wound (amazing story, I recommend it). Berry is describing his feelings about having grown up on a farm in the south where his grandfather owned slaves. It's a very complex book about this "hidden wound" but the part I read the other day has just stuck with me and I cannot get it out of my mind.

Berry is very good friends with the black slaves on his grandfather's farm (named Nick and Aunt Georgie) and decides to invite Nick to his birthday party. Nick, knowing full well he could not enter the house for the party, sat outside on a bench and observed the party. Berry saw him, and decided he would rather be with Nick than be with the party because he loved him. After relaying this story, Berry says the following: (These are just a few exerpts)

To both the racist and the puritan, childhood is not a time of life that we grow out of, as the life of the child grows out of the life of the parent or as a plant grows out of the soil, but a time and a state of consciousness to be left behind, to cut oneself off from: "when I became a man, I put away childish things."

I am not necessarily objecting to the manly virtues, but I am objecting that they
should be so exlusively assigned to grownups, and that grownups should be so exlusively restritced to them. A man may have all the prescribed adult virtues and, if he lacks the childhood virtues, still be a dunce and a bore and a liar.

Under the dispensations of childhood, a child may cross the boundaries of class and race and property with a good deal of freedom, and his reason for crossing these boundaries is his honesty in the face of experience.

You see this all the time in children. They see no color, no political party, no rich or poor. They simply love everyone around them. I saw this a lot as I served in the orphanages in Bulgaria. The young children did not care that I was different, they just loved me because I was a person...just like them.

It's sad that we lose this "childhood honesty" as Berry talks about. Wouldn't the world be so perfectly splendid if we all acted as children do? I don't think we should be childISH, but childLIKE. I don't know if honesty is a good word to use, because I don't think that we all suddenly become horrible people when we are adults, but I do believe that as we enter adulthood social pressures and expectations somehow force us into being grown up, and not so loving and innocent and simple anymore.

As people rant and rave about politics and Obama's healthcare reform plan, I can't help but wonder what Obama feels like as people yell at him as he is trying to clarify his plans. I would hate to be President. I would cry myself to sleep every night. On my facebook status once I said that I wish I could tell Obama that I think he's a good man. Man, oh mighty did that get people going. I wish we all (including me) could look at Obama--and everyone for that matter!--and see the good in them, as a little child would do. I know I said no politics, but this is about people, not issues at hand.

Thanks for listening (er..reading) my thoughts. I just feel like this world needs to start being a kinder place or we are in some serious trouble. I am going to try harder to follow some true examples. Children.

Naska and Mimi, from the Bratsigovo, Bulgaria orphanage