Lindsay Eland - Middle Grade Author

A few years ago, on an outing to the zoo, my kids and I came across the most extraordinary thing, at least for my children.

Elephant poop. 

They stood in awe at this massive mound of feces, they then wondered about other animals poop, and finally they burst into giggles at something that at the same time was so disgustingly stinky and gross as well as totally awesome! 

We, as adults, look at our children or the children around us and think in our mature, sophisticated thinking “Oh, they’re just kids.” We think smugly how nice it will be when they get older and can understand and have more intelligible conversations than how big elephant poop is. But really it is us, the sophisticated adults, who need to learn from them. 

Wonder. It’s a holy moment to see a child’s eyes grow wide at their first glimpse of the ocean. To hear them giggle in awe at the first snowflakes of winter or gasp at the moon hanging in the sky. How full our lives would be if we could see through their lens.

Dream. Children dream wild reckless dreams that they know beyond any doubt can be reached. We as adults cringe at dreams and analyze whether or not the odds of succeeding are in our favor. At an inkling of excitement over something, we immediately think of all the reasons why we shouldn’t do it, why we couldn’t do it, why we shouldn’t dream, why we shouldn’t strive for something as silly as that. How sad we must seem to kids.

Laughter. A child laughing is, in my opinion, one of the most breathtaking and beautiful things we will ever see.  They laugh easy and heartily. Never taking themselves too seriously, or you for that matter. If only we could laugh like that again.

Kids dream boundlessly, live in wonder joyfully, and laugh freely. It is my wish, my prayer, my desire that somehow instead of them becoming like me, that I, might live my life more like them.

After all, a child’s shoes are big ones to fill.

Mosaic’s are breathtaking things. Bits and pieces of colored and broken glass put together in a way that you’d never think could be possible when you look at the mess on the floor.

Memories are much like mosaics.

Bits of words, a scent, a fleeting vision, a snippet of dialogue. Some memories can make us cringe with embarrassment, and others can still bring a chuckle after so many years. They are little tiny moments out of an entire lifespan that form how we think, what we are afraid of, how deeply we love, how fully we are willing to be loved, what we dream for, what we aspire to, what we think is laugh-out-loud funny or sobbing sad.

Whether we like it or not, our memories, both ugly and beautiful, are a part of who we are. They always will be.

So what do we do with them?

Do we allow those memories to be glued together into something warped and misshapen or do we pick up the pieces and, like a mosaic, create in ourselves a work of art?

My kids love to watch the old Coyote and Road Runner cartoons. They laugh at the coyote as he plots and schemes to catch the speedy bird only to wind up with an anvil on his head or taking a five hundred foot dive off the edge of a cliff.

You look at the coyote and think, “Just stop! Why go through the pain? Why try just to fail again?”

That’s kind of how it feels getting a rejection.

You send something that you have spent hours of time, and love, and energy on out into the great wide world. It’s a piece of yourself wrapped up in a funny story, or an engaging character, or in a touching moment.

And you want to share it with someone so badly that you’re willing to get the anvil on the head and you’re okay with falling off the cliff for the twentieth time.

You can’t give up.

It’s a piece of you. It’s a piece that thinks the world is pure magic and that life is a wild adventure. And heck, if you’re not getting hit on the head with an anvil or you’re not falling off cliffs, then you’ll never get to see the day when instead of hitting the ground once again, you find that somehow your wings work this time!

And on that day, you pull up into the sky and soar over the precipice where you fell so hard. 

You look down and realize that flying would never have been so exciting, and so wonderful, and so utterly amazing if you had flown the first time. 

That somehow the bruises and the bandages made flying that much sweeter. 

And as much as the anvils and the cliffs hurt…

I’ll take my chances.

I remember playing in thick, brown, oozy mud when I was little. My sisters and I would take spoons from the kitchen, find big, smooth rocks outside, settle into the mud and make cakes. We’d decorate the dark brown blobs with little red berries from the bushes, or leaves from the trees, maybe even add a sprig of pine in the center or small sticks like candles.

I still love the squish of mud between my fingers and the sound it makes when I pull my foot out and find my shoe left behind.

But that’s what happens in mud.

You’re walking along, maybe even running, but the moment you hit mud you slow down and step careful. You lift your feet up and tip-toe the rest of the way. Maybe you stop and try to step out of the mud onto solid ground. And if you are in a beat-up 1989 Jeep Wrangler you become…stuck.

That’s how I feel sometimes with a story.

Stuck. 

I don’t love the squishy feeling or the squelchy sound.

I want to keep moving at the same pace with the same momentum and the same inspiration that I had before. I whine and moan, fidget and fuss, thinking how unproductive I am just standing in the same spot. Not moving. Not making any progress.

Then I have to think about those bright days after a rain, when my sisters and I would be outside with our spoons, our imagination, and some really good mud.

And so with that troublesome page in hand, I settle my behind down in the mud, take a spoon, and make a cake.