Stargirl is a book written by Jerry Spinelli and it’s totally written for middle schoolers but I read it because my love for children’s literature takes over sometimes. So it’s about this girl who was homeschooled all her life but her junior year decides to start attending this local high school. She’s totally out there and does some pretty crazy things, everyone thinks she is just the most interesting creature they’ve seen. This one part really caught my attention. It’s a conversation from one of the main characters with another character describing how Stargirl is in touch with something that many of us don’t understand. Goes like this…
“You know, there’s a place we all inhabit, but we don’t much think about it, we’re scarcely conscious of it, and it lasts for less than a minute a day…It’s in the morning, for most of us. It’s that time, those few seconds when we’re coming out of sleep but we’re not really awake yet. For those few seconds we’re something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are, for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then… we open our eyes and the day is before us, and we become ourselves.”
I’m not sure why that struck a chord with me. It did. I think I’m more of a dreamer than I let myself think I am. These couple sentences allow my mind to wonder and float to this glorious place described and place that almost sounds…heavenly. Now there’s something to dream about.
I want to get back to the basics. Simplify. I think that’s why I liked the passage so much, it’s simple….untitled, untamed, suspended between the was and the will be….
