On a recent trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, I visited the Georgia O'Keefe Museum of Art. One of her quotes struck me so much, I had them type it out for me and brought it home. It is:

"The meaning of a word to me is not as exact as the meaning of a color. Colors and shapes make a more definite statement than words. I am often amazed at the spoken and written word telling me what I have painted. Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest."

Two phrases have kept turning over in my mind and heart "telling me what I have painted" and "It is what I have done." We really can't ever really know for sure another's intentions when they create. But we surely do try!

When my granddaughter, Elizabeth was six, she drew a picture of the two of us. Between us was a heart and she had printed something in the heart that I could not make out. I interpreted the heart she had drawn as representing our love for each other. When she asked me what I thought it stood for, that was what I told her.

No," she giggled, "Grandma you are so silly." (I love this moment with children, when they are about to tell you something that they can "see" but you cannot.) "The heart is the circle of life, Gram!"

The "circle of life" I thought, wherever did she get that? When I asked her, Elizabeth said, "you know, it's from the Lion King and you know how much you like the Lion King!"

I love this picture and it will probably be on my refrigerator when Elizabeth is twenty-five! Elizabeth could see the circle of life in a heart! How wonderful! Children take in so much about the world and those in it who touch their lives in some way, and yet have little opportunity to give creative expression to what they see, hear, experience, and learn. We are too busy telling them what to see, how to see it, what to think about it, how to draw it...basically, how to color in the lines. This approach creates followers not leaders. In general, children rarely have the opportunity to explore their own thoughts, feelings, and way of being in the world and to have them validated as having meaning and importance rather than as being "right and wrong."

When they finally do have the opportunity to explore our inner thoughts, feelings and responses to the world, they are too often filled with self-doubt, a lack of confidence, or a fear of being too different because the view of the world has for so long been seen through another's lens... parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, teachers, older siblings, peers.

If we want our children to believe in themselves and their relationship to the world, we truly need to let them express themselves in their own unique way; we need to listen without "telling them what they have painted." We need to let them see through their own lens, so that they grow in confidence, their spirit leading them and connecting them to life. We need to let them realize that as children, they influence the "circle of life" in vital and important ways.

Copyright © 2003 Elaine K. Williams. All rights reserved worldwide.