As is the new normal, I took a walk with my boys yesterday.
At first, my oldest declared that we would not walk very far. Our usual walk to the bridge and back is a little over a mile. As we walked, however, we kept finding things to distract him from the distance. At one point, all the boys were drawn to the weeds growing on the side of the road. There were yellow flowers and what the boys affectionately called “wishing flowers” (dandelions). “Mommy, can I pick you a flower?” one of them asked. “Yes, honey! Thank you!”
They picked me yellow flowers and blew on wishing flowers making wishes only they could hear.
Shortly before we arrived back home we came across bluebonnets carpeting the small strip of grass between us and the street. “Mommy, can we pick them?” I smiled and said “No, do not disturb their little community. They need each other and we need to be able to come back and join them again.” They paused and watched the bluebonnets dance in the breeze.
This is a lonely time, isn’t it? Perhaps the loneliest part is not knowing when exactly life will return to normal. And in this’ll loneliness and fear and uncertainty, maybe we have forgotten to join in and dance in the breeze with the bluebonnets, dandelions, and daffodils.
“I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed – and gazed – but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye⠀
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”
-William Wordsworth
What can fill your heart with pleasure today? What can remind you that you are not alone?
