Stay Signed In
Do you want to access your site more quickly on this computer? Check this box, and your username and password will be remembered for two weeks. Click logout to turn this off.
Stay Safe
Do not check this box if you are using a public computer. You don't want anyone seeing your personal info or messing with your site.
What I want for my daughter is an important beginning, a background where she can most naturally grow. My own childhood was rough but it was a good time too, and I want her to have one like it. I was lucky to be raised in a country district, rich with unpackaged and unpriced rewards and although we were materially poor (and I don't wish that she should be poor) I believe there are worse things than that kind of poverty. There is, for instance, the burden of abundance, often as sultifying as want, when too many non-stop treats and ready-made diversions can mount almost to infanticide, can glut a child's appetites, ravish it of wonder, and leave it no space or silence for dreams. So I would like to give my child chances to be surprised, periods of waiting to sharpen her longings, then some treat or treasure that was worth looking forward to, and an interval to enjoy and remember it.
I was brought up in a village when childhood and the countryside were simply their own rewards, when electricity had not obliterated the old ghost in the corners, the songs were not changed once a week. That time and condition can't come again, but I'd like my daughter to know what is left of it. For it still contains people undazed by street lamps, who knows darkness and the movements of stars, and who can talk about mysteries the townsman has forgotten, and who are not entirely cut off from the soil's live skin by insulations of cement and asphalt.
I want to take my daughter to this surviving world - not as a visitor, but to be native in it. So she may accept it simply as part of creation, and take it's light into her eyes and bones. To know the intimacy of living close to the seasons, where still the gods in possession; to feel the quick earth stir when she treads upon it, to take the smokeless wind in her mouth, to watch the green year turn, lambs drop and stagger, birds hatch, grass grow and seed.
