Dancing With Myself

And then my heart with pleasure fills, 
And dances with the daffodils.






There is a long road that runs along the middle of my part of town. I drive along this stretch nearly everyday when I am home. For three years it took me to school, last summer it took me to work, and it has taken me to church every Sunday since I was ten. If you look closely there are small brown signs that run along the side declaring it as a historic highway. In December, I was riding home from church gazing longingly at the warm, sunny skies above this road and the trees next to it - trees that never seems to let go of their warm green lace even in the dead of winter. California. I dreaded leaving early the next morning, back to the slush and brown barren landscape of Utah. The smell of the warm wind wafted in through my open window and I was taken back to the countless summer days spent traveling back and forth along this road. Tilting my head back against the head rest, I spoke these thoughts aloud to no one in particular. After a moment, my dad half laughed, "Sarah, you love to live in the past."



I have been called many things, and could definitely add one or two adjectives of my own to the list. Nostalgic would be one of them. Today never seems to live up to yesterday. Most of the time, it is a curse that keeps me from simply enjoying whatever moment of life I am living. But then there are the days when I need nothing more than to be somewhere else with no way of getting there. J.M. Barrie said that God gave us memories so that we could have roses in the Decembers of our lives. I think he and Wordsworth would have gotten along.



Poetry may seem like an awfully convoluted way to express a thought, but it is sentiments like those in I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud, that reach beyond intellectual perplexity and touch our hearts. Lines like these whisper to our souls, "You understand this one. You've been here before." 





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.



Oscar Wilde shared a thought I often use as a checkpoint for how I'm doing. "To live," he said, "is the rarest thing in the world. Most people only exist." Each day passes us by full of moments that seem so insignificant, and yet will be the ones we treasure and long for later on. These moments are golden because they are a window into a more magical time than it seems we are currently in. Nostalgia indeed distracts from enjoying such moments when they stand before us, and although we might not appreciate what we have until it's gone, in a blissful moment of solitude, we are still able to dance.