daffodils

Daffodils by Alex Mogilevsky

One of my favorite ways to spend my time while living in New York City is to spend it with the unbelievably wonderful 10-year old girl I babysit, Alice. I've always loved being around children, and have always been particularly fond of their company.  I really like who I am around them—I feel like I shine, like this is what I’m good at. I’m super lucky to have spent my days with some exceptional ones. Here in NY, Alice is just that: exceptional.  While babysitting her last night for the first time in a while, we decided to take a walk her upper east side neighborhood and then continued our chat in her courtyard, taking a seat on a bench with our backs facing a perfectly manicured row of daffodils.  Alice’s face lit up when I identified the flowers as being daffodils, as she had been preparing all week for an in-class presentation of William Wordsworth’s poem about these very flowers.  Being the cutest, sweetest gal that she is, she snapped two daffodils up from the ground and insisted we both hold one while she recited her poem for me. It was beyond cute.  We then got into talking about spring, and nature, and how magical the patterns in nature are (she actually said, in an existentialist prose, “yah, like what is a zebra?”), and I couldn’t stop smiling thinking to myself: what an old soul.  Here is this born and raised city girl, surrounded by a bajillion images and advertisements and toys and fancy sofas and clothes perennially displayed in store windows, the positive/negative side effect of living in this urban atmosphere that have been getting me down lately, and for the first time in a while, I returned to earth (figuratively, of course) and stopped thinking about all of the “stuff.” All of the stuff that I see everyday (again, another positive/negative side effect of working in an industry and building surrounded by pretty things, but nonetheless things), and all of the stuff that I suddenly find myself wanting – things that didn’t matter to me yesterday and things I can’t take my mind off of now.  It’s hard to draw the line between being creative and being obsessive—the two often go hand in hand and healthy doses of both often results in success….but when obsessive takes over (hello!...spending hours obsessively looking on the internet for the perfect and perfectly priced area rug that this 20-something can actually afford) it’s exhausting, draining and perspective-skewing.  As silly as it may sound, this sweet, lovely New York moment that I had with my fave 10 year old literally yanked my mind right out of a material rut, and back to the daffodils.  

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed--and gazed--but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

- william wordsworth

A host, of golden daffodils;