A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed or even lost before we reach adulthood. I wish I could give a sense of wonder to each child in the world, so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote to the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with artificial things, the alienation from the sources of our strength.
How many oceans have vanished in sand, how much sand has been prayed hard in the stone, how much time has been wept away in the singing horn of the seashells, how much mortal abandonment in the fishes' pearl eyes, how many morning trumpets in the coral, how many star patterns in crystal, how much seed of laughter in the gulls' throat, how many threads of longing for home have been traversed on the nightly course of the constellations, how much fertile earth for the root of the word: You -- behind all the crashing patterns of the secrets You --