a sense of wonder

As children we are living balls of curiosity. Our eyes are bright with wonder and we are fascinated by the simplest  things--colors and shapes and sounds. The world is one big bright and shining thing and our brains explore it every waking moment as we make sense of the external. as we grow older we gradually lose our sense of wonder as responsibility gets in the way of the magic of being. Our brains begin to categorize things, we lose our sense of being part of reality and a great divide creeps into our souls. we begin to feel separate from a nature that we  were once part of. As bob  dylan once said "if you are not busy being born you are busy dying" Somewhere along the line of life a break occurs and man loses touch with the child within, he seeks escape in many forms but finds no refuge from paradise lost and life becomes comfortably numb and quiet desperation is a shadow that is always just at his feet.  If one looks at buddhist monks you can often see the smiling eyes of a child in a man that is 85 years old. Some people learn not to become stale and brittle in this world and they keep the fire of life burning bright in the often dark cave of existence. I have known people who are 40 years old and the fire is gone inside. It is a long slog to the end if you have lost the fire in your belly. Art is like a fire, a flame. It is passed from one person to the other even after the artist is long dead. Rembrandt still gets my heart pumping hundreds of years after he went toes up. The trick to life is to keep the fire inside alive. Society would like nothing more than to turn your individual nature into some generic stamped out, conformed lump of nothing. Being yourself in this world is a herculean feat and most people hide in the shadows and deny themselves of their own true voice. This is a tragedy and sadly more common than the cold. Life is a lot shorter than we think it is. It is a tiny wink of an eye, a pebble in a puddle, a brief and passing storm. I will never understand why people waste their lives hiding in refuge from themselves or life. For you the blind who once could see, the bell tolls for thee. 


--alexo