Dancing with the Daffodils

Photo credit: aussiegall / Foter.com / CC BY

In the summertime, the Irish roads are lined with wild, yellow blossoms, king-sized daffodils to amaze the very tastebuds of delight. Those lovely masses trailed along the clover-splotched tarmac and became more beautiful with every curve in the road. I marveled at them wherever I went, and one evening, after returning home from the local library — yes, I had a library card in Ireland — my arms were loaded with books. I tossed them onto the sofa and declared: "I'm rich!"

In a response to this bold declaration and my endless fascination over those wondrous, bright blooms, this poem was given to me:

Daffodils

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

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

There are many things in life that bring on the rich wealth of pleasurable memory, little things like discovering a happy label on an ice-cream cone: 

...or unplugging the janitor's vacuum and leaving a cookie next to the socket for him to find. Listening to his shy laughter tinkling down the hall enriched my spirit as nothing else could. Suddenly, I was walking down an Irish causeway lined with thousands of golden blossoms in "sprightly dance." I was rich, and the feeling only compounded.

When I was a kid, my sister wrote a poem about me, titled Bubbly, for a school assignment. The title speaks for itself, but I believe it is this re-emerged trait of mine, boiled down to the simple sobriquet "bubbly" that enables my soul to be rich. I wonder how many of us have buried our simplistic traits to the cost of our souls?

Leonardo Da Vinci once said, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."

Photo credit: Jeff Kubina / Foter.com / CC BY-SA

How easy — and hard — it is to let go of the things we imagine bring us happiness, and return to the splendor of our true selves, unspoiled and victorious. Let in the light, let it wash away old hurts and cleanse your regrets. Be filled to the brim with the simple elegance of dancing daffodils, for, "Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet [daffodil] sheds on the heel that has crushed it." ~ Mark Twain

To All of my "Sophisticated" Readers,

Until Next Time,

Simply Eliott