A five-year-old shaman showed me how small-minded I can be

If you want a guide to the imaginal, find a kid

Hello! This is How to Go Home, a newsletter about imagination and the imaginal realm—the deeper, truer reality that’s always waiting to welcome us home. In September, the theme is: More real than a car park. All month, posts will explore the truth that imagination isn’t fantasy: it’s more real than the material world.

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Hello,

On Monday, I was hanging out with my friend’s five-year-old daughter when she said maybe the best sentence anyone’s ever said to me. “Sometimes,” she said, “I have a terrible wolf thought.”

On investigation, it turned out she meant she’d discovered that there used to be wolves in England, and that her “wolf thought” is that there’s one left, and that it comes to her window at night, waiting hot-breathed in the dark to break in and steal her teddy bear.

I regret my response. I reassured her that wolves aren’t really interested in teddy bears and don’t attack people for no reason, and that in any case there haven’t been wolves in this country for a very long time. How long?, she wanted to know. None of my attempts to translate centuries worked, so we settled on somewhere between dinosaurs and her granny.

This was the wrong answer. Because the point isn’t whether there is a flesh-and-blood wolf outside her window at night: it’s that she feels a wolf there. I wish I’d encouraged her to speak to the wolf: to try to learn what it wants, what it’s like to be the very last wolf in this country, and why it’s chosen her to speak to. I wish I’d told her that to be chosen by a wolf is quite a privilege.

This is what we do to kids: hard-knuckle them out of their god-given imaginations and into our own impoverished, materialist way of experiencing the world. In this instance, and I’d bet in most instances, this is driven by an attempt to be kind. I didn’t want her lying in bed at night, tormented by wolf thoughts—I’ve had enough of those nights myself. And even when kids are called dreamers, as if that’s a bad thing, or told to buck up and grow up and get real—it’s always out of concern for their ability to navigate this hell realm of car parks and taxes and collapsing cement that we’ve created. The trouble is that in robbing them—and ourselves—of their dreaming, we lock all of us ever further into the nightmare of our everyday.

The Romantics famously saw that children are closer to god than adults; that to be a child is not to be an unformed adult but rather its own thing, with its own form of wisdom. Over the centuries, and especially as the turgid Victorians ascended, that form of wisdom came to be associated with purity and a sort of wan, sickly moralizing. Think of all the stories of consumption-ridden Victorian children who seemed simply too good for this world.

Bollocks to that. It’s a negative definition that tells us more about adult stupidity than about children. Already by Victoria’s reign, the people of this country were almost two millennia into the hard-knuckling of imported and imposed structures of belief and society. It was already thousands of years since we’d burned or chopped down most of our forests. We walked through a land stripped of trees and wolves and the spirits that have always spoken through them, and we filled the vacuum with our own pathetic monologues about manners and with fantasies of a cruel, punisher god, and we were so hungry to fill the holes inside us where our belonging had once lived, and so convinced of the rectitude of our idiocy, that we had colonized a quarter of the world.

The wisdom of children isn’t just that they’re untainted by our adult world; it’s that they have direct access to something else. Something most of us lost contact with long ago. Something that every traditional culture around the world has, or had, some conception of: the dreamtime, the otherworld, the eighth climate. And because most adults don’t know that that place exists; or that it’s real; or that for the vast majority of human history around the world it has been recognized as the source of all wisdom and meaning; or that when we lose contact with it, things very quickly start to go wrong—because we are so very ignorant, in other words, we knock this out of children as nothing but fantasy, and for what? So that they’ll someday be able to find a credit card with 0% APR and choose the least-awful political candidate.

I wish I’d said to my little pal: The wolf doesn’t want to hurt you or steal your teddy bear. She just wants to be heard, all these years after we killed off all her kin. She’s chosen you because you can still hear her. What is she trying to say?

Love,

xx Ellie