(art by Jean Pierre Cassigneul)
My teachers all complained of my daydreaming. They told my Mother that my head was “in the clouds” and not on my lessons. Which was true, given that I could look out the windows of the classroom on the woods where I loved to spend time and longed to be in instead of trapped within this school building. From an early age, I understood that to be labeled a “daydreamer” was both negative and deeply frowned upon. To daydream was to waste time. One could not afford to waste time. School was for learning (supposedly). To become lost in thought was frivolous and was sheer idleness. After all, “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” To do so went against our very Puritan work ethic. One must always be busy, one cannot just be.
Yet no matter how much criticism I received, I remained a daydreamy boy whose head was always lost somewhere in the clouds of imagining. I was a stripling of a boy and did not care for sports but searched for hours in the woods behind our house for a magical portal to another, more wondrous realm. School made everything so explainable and commonplace. The world just seemed so much more magical and mysterious than they made it out to be. I was endlessly curious, filled with questions that found no simple answers. When adults either could not or would not answer them to my satisfaction, I would begin to turn them over and over in my mind in the same way I did rocks in my rock tumbler.
I was a natural born woolgatherer.
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