core goodness

There is this essence I have been trying to capture for a while, just what it is beyond a nebulous feeling. It is that special quality that we associate with children and call innocence. We see it in animals too, mainly our pets. It is part of why we love them so desperately. They posses this quality that we think we have lost. That almost all adults have lost- except perhaps the mentally retarded (they never lose that child-like quality). We think that it is killed by growing up, by seeing what life is really like, by being worked on by all the worlds rough and ugly edges until we are hard and unkind like it. And so we cling to little children and animals and prize that illusive quality that they manage to posses and we managed to lose. I think it comes down to something my mother has said and been saying, what children posses is a core goodness. Innocence is a poor word, it fails to capture what it really is that is in a child and rather communicates that what we really think we had and lost was our naivety. That we went from a state of not-knowing to knowing. That belief steals from children what makes that quality in them truly precious. I guess it is the reenactment in every individual of the adam and eve story. For each of us we have absorbed and believe that we start out a certain way- innocent, and that we come upon this tree of knowledge and eat and know- and knowing is our sin; we should have chosen to remain ignorant. But the myth is wrong, it wasn't knowledge that took away our innocence. It was an inherent core goodness that we began with that was gradually damaged until we thought it was gone. Until little events in our adult life bring up that goodness in us and surprise us because we find it's still there, dormant. I can't think of a new myth to replace it. The story of a child being inundated by a world of damaged people and joining them. So we mistake core goodness for innocence because we think it is a quality specific to children rather than our innate inheritance that is stripped from us over time. We think it is a small quality, fragile and vulnerable... And maybe it is, but maybe not as delicate as we believe? Because it keeps popping up in us as we go about our lives and reminding us of who we used to be, who we desperately miss and worst of all who we believe we are responsible for killing.

A text at six in the morning about a dream woke me up and kept me awake with these thoughts so I wanted to write them down.