highly sensitive power

“It’s like that secret place you had as a kid, where you could say whatever bubbled into your mind and not worry about what anyone thought…. When you went to your secret place, you had no fear. Try to remember the worlds you created there. Try to recall the heroic roles you invented for yourself, the demons that fell before you, the villains you vanquished.”

~ Doug Hall, Jump Start Your Brain

Dining table forts masterminded with best friends, Mom delivering lunch by sliding it beneath the draping bedspreads into the flashlight dazzle. Multiple-room crawl-through mansions made from cardboard boxes – big ones, like the ones the new washer and dryer came in – with cut-out flap-windows and rugs inside and fairy lights draped all over. Thorny bramble safari to the distant center, branch cutters passed back and forth, sunlight straying through in moving bits, lunchboxes finally opened on crossed legs. Long driftwood dragged across the beach, dug deeply into sand, leaned and balanced until the wood teepee closes out all but the thinnest slices of light, and the tiny doorway opens from inside to let in the all-new view of the sea.

The bed tent I made last weekend over our queen-sized sleigh bed, engineered with little white wall hooks and intricately printed East Indian cloth draped over sturdy string supports, furnished with low-watt lamps, a zillion pillows, a portable stereo, a notebook, and my favourite pen. Just and only for me. I solved the world’s problems in that tent.

Please don’t grow all the way up. You’ll find more parts of you waiting patiently in the secret spaces you create for yourself.

There is a deeper wave than this / Tugging at your hand

~ Sting, “Love is the Seventh Wave,” The Dream of the Blue Turtles

Photo by Michael Mundhenk