“During your life on earth, childhood is the time of most intense happening,” writes John O’Donohue.  Yet in this intense happening of “wonder, discovery, and difficulty, words and thought to name them have not yet arrived.”

Here are some excerpts from O’Donohue’s insights on the nature of childhood from “Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on our Yearning to Belong“:

The Wildness of Divinity

You cannot immunize yourself against your longing. You love to reach beyond, to discover something new. Knowing calls you out of yourself. Discovery delights the heart. This is the natural joy of childhood and the earned joy of the artist. The child and the artist are pilgrims of discovery. When you limit your life to the one frame of thinking, you close out the mystery…

There is some wildness of divinity in us, calling us to live everything.

Under the Canopy of Innocence

Childhood is a forest we never recognize while we are in it. Our minds and imagination and dreams constantly return there to explore the roots of our personality and presence…

Childhood is an absolute treasure house of imagination… so much has happened there under the canopy of innocence… The memory of childhood is so rich that it takes a lifetime to unpack…

Innocence is precious and powerful… It is not accidental that the manner of our arrival in the universe is shrouded in innocence. The first innocence protects us for knowing the sinister negativity of life. It also immunizes us against recognition of how strange it is to be here, thrown into a world which is crowded with infinities of space, time, matter, and difference…

Innocence Minds Us

Innocence is a state of unknowing and the readiness to know… [the innocence of childhood] only gives way gradually to new recognitions and experiences. Even when severe trauma occurs, it is somehow integrated; though it does deep damage, it still rarely extinguishes the flame of innocence. There is a poignant sense in which the child must keep its innocence alive in order to continue to grow and not allow the darkness to swamp its little mind.  Innocence minds us.

Innocence permits the child to belong in the world. This is the secret of a child’s trust; it assumes that belonging is natural and sheltering…

Innocence has Lyrical Continuity

Innocence has a lyrical continuity… The innocence of the child is its immediacy and nearness to everything… Before and below words, you invest the delight and concern of your heart…

The child lives in the neighbourhood of wonder where innocence keeps mystery playful. Each new event and encounter is all-absorbing. The child lives in the house of discovery.

What do you know about the way of a child?