Living by Wonder: The Imaginative Life of Childhood

Whether you want to renew the child you grew from, your relationship with children, or your teaching of them, reading this book will give you the emotional and philosophical grounds into which you may begin planting bulbs or seeds whenever you like. As in David Spangler's book Parent as Mystic, Mystic as Parent, Living By Wonder: The Imaginative Life of Childhood provides support for the invigorating idea that children are our teachers. Richard Lewis in this book goes further in presenting children and their imaginative creations--mostly poetry here--as practically enlightened beings. He often compares the poetry he has helped them to find in themselves with the poetry of great classical poets--and often it is difficult to tell the difference.The children whose poetry he includes are between the ages of 5 to 10 (he doesn't always indicate the age, which is sometimes annoying). One child wrote the following: The wind was soft and silky. / A cloud alone / calmly drifts away. / A bird by itself flies away. / A cloud appears / and helps me home.Lewis includes numerous such poems in this book, all of which, in their insight and fresh beauty, invite us to listen--and teach us to do so. We put down this book having become better listeners, hearing beauty in perhaps the least expected things around us--just as we did in our childhood days, days Lewis poetically refers to as "our grasshopper and salamander days" when ". . .we trampled leaves with our feet just to hear what kind of sounds leaves made. . .slept, only to wake, with the strange sense of how could we be awake when we had only just been sleeping."That's what reading this book is like. If we let its poetry in--as well as Lewis's poetic analysis of it--we just might awaken as if we'd stumbled upon enlightenment like any Buddhist monk who meditated his whole life, with the sound of a garden rake falling, or a leaf crunching beneath our foot. As Basho, quoted by Lewis, writes: A chestnut falls: / The insects cease their crying / Among the grasses.Lewis--and really--all the children he has written about and quoted--can exercise our flabby ear muscles, which connect to our hearts, for everything is connected, as many of the poems in this book show us. "The moonlight is shining. A poem. If you can read the poem in the moonlight, it will shine on the universe. Then everything all around us will be a poem. . . ." Reading this book is like taking a giant step on the road toward enlightenment. All around us are unexpected magnificent little giants of teachers, our children.