From: A Life in Four Movements: An Unfinished Symphony

When I first encountered the phrase “Many poets and writers possess the soul of a child,” something electric ran through me—that peculiar sensation of recognition that arrives when truth names a reality you’ve lived but never quite articulated. At sixty-seven, having spent decades excavating the layers of my consciousness through dreams, art, psychedelics, and ruthless self-examination, I find myself asking: What is the soul of a child? And why does this description feel like both affirmation and indictment of my entire existence?

The Perceptual Revolution

Psychologist Alison Gopnik makes a startling claim in The Philosophical Baby: “Being inexperienced in the way of the world, the mind of the young child has few preconceptions to guide their perceptions down predictable tracks. Instead, the child approaches reality with the astonishment of an adult on psychedelics.” She continues: “If you want to understand what an enlarged consciousness looks like, all you have to do is have tea with a four-year-old.”

The summary is brutal in its clarity: children are basically tripping all the time.

This isn’t metaphor. It’s neuroscience. Children exist in what researchers call “lantern consciousness”—a broad, diffuse attention that illuminates everything equally, finding wonder in the ordinary, patterns in the chaos, magic in the mundane. Adults, by contrast, develop “spotlight consciousness”—narrow, focused, efficient, and catastrophically limited.

The soul of a child, then, is first and foremost a perceptual stance: the capacity to encounter reality without the deadening filter of preconception. It’s the ability to see the world as it actually is—strange, beautiful, terrifying, alive—rather than as we’ve been taught to see it.

The Emotional Authenticity

But perception alone doesn’t capture it. A child’s soul carries something deeper: emotional immediacy and authenticity. Children haven’t yet learned to dissociate from their feelings or perform emotional appropriateness. When they’re joyful, they’re joyful with their whole bodies. When they’re devastated, they’re devastated without self-consciousness.

I remember watching a toddler on a running trail, face clenched and swollen red, tears streaming, gasping for air between wails—trapped in a stroller. The mother simply placed the child on the trail, and the transformation was instantaneous: cries stopped, a smile of contentment emerged, all evidence of the emotional storm vanished except for a pink flush quickly receding from the face.

This is the emotional economy of childhood: feelings arrive with full force, are fully expressed, and then dissolve. No residue. No performance. No shame.

I’ve spent sixty-seven years learning—and then unlearning—the opposite. My religious upbringing taught me that emotions were dangerous, that sensitivity was weakness, that feeling things deeply meant something was wrong with me. The institutions of my first life systematically trained me to dissociate from my actual emotional reality and perform whatever feelings were deemed appropriate.

My “confession” in 2011—the affair, the leaving of ministry—wasn’t just a moral failure or midlife crisis. It was my soul of a child finally refusing to be silent. My body, which had been screaming for years, staged a full rebellion. The authentic feelings I’d repressed for five decades erupted with the force of a child’s tantrum: raw, messy, inconvenient, and absolutely necessary for survival.

The Creative Play

Journal Entry, Buena Vista, Colorado, 2009: 

“A name that neither society nor the church understands. Artist. Seer. Dreamer. Herald. True names. But names misunderstood and misused from time immemorial… Called to draw, paint, sing, write, create and SEE moments of earthliness. Moments others can’t or perhaps refuse to see.”

Carl Jung, at the height of his career as a world-renowned psychoanalyst, would set aside time between appointments to go outside and play with stones as he did as a child. During his intense confrontation with the unconscious, Jung felt he had no choice but to return to his childhood and “take up that child’s life.”

He believed that when a memory of playing as a child touches a good deal of emotion, it means there is life remaining in those things—evidence that one’s inner child is still around and has creative energy forgotten over time. Playing as an adult can help bridge the gap from the present to the wonder of childhood.

For me, it was doodling. As a child in the Appalachian mountains, I would sketch and doodle endlessly with a pencil. When I read as an adult that the foundation of watercolor is a good pencil sketch, I was immediately captivated. I bought pencils, brushes, and watercolors, and the subsequent paintings have resulted in some of the most joyous and life-giving moments of my existence.

When I paint, I don’t experience time. Ten hours pass as if they were seconds. 

Journal Entry, Austin, TX, 2012: 

“When I paint with watercolors, more than leading worship for thousands, more than any previous life activity—I feel God’s pleasure.”

This is the soul of a child: the capacity to enter what psychologists call “flow state” so completely that the boundaries between self and activity dissolve. Children do this naturally. Adults have to relearn it, often at great cost.

The quote from Robert McCammon’s Boy’s Life that I’ve carried for decades captures this perfectly: “See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out.”

The soul of a child is the part of us that still knows magic. The part that hasn’t been domesticated, sanitized, or made safe for institutional consumption.

The Vulnerability and Openness

One of my recurring dreams features a beautiful underground cavern filled with colorful, unclothed human-like beings. In my dream analysis with Claude, we explored what this nakedness represents: “Clothing often symbolizes persona—the mask we wear for the world. The fact that these beings are unadorned suggests a state of naturalness, authenticity, freedom. They exist as they truly are without pretense or fear of judgment.”

Children, before they learn shame, exist in this state. They’re undefended. Vulnerable. Completely themselves. They haven’t yet constructed the elaborate armor that adults mistake for maturity.

My high sensitivity—what I once considered my greatest defect—is actually a childlike gift. Highly sensitive people (about 20% of the population, I learned) “pick up on things other people miss.” Their “sensitive, emotional experience is at such a constant intensity that it shapes their personality and lives.”

For fifty years, I believed something was wrong with me. Too sensitive. Too emotional. Too affected by things “normal” people could handle. Then I discovered I’m not only a Highly Sensitive Person but also have misophonia (decreased tolerance to sound) and affective empathy (the capacity to literally feel others’ emotions).

These aren’t defects. They’re the neurological substrate of the soul of a child: radical openness to experience, even when that openness hurts.

The Integration: Barcelona and Beyond

At sixty-seven, living in Barcelona with Gina, I’ve finally stopped apologizing for the soul of a child that has both tormented and saved me.

Many people speak of “growing up” and “putting away childish things” as the goal of maturity. But what if true maturity is actually the integration of childlike qualities with adult wisdom? What if the developmental trajectory isn’t from childishness to adult seriousness, but from unconscious childlikeness to conscious, chosen childlikeness?

George Bernard Shaw wrote: “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”

Facebook post, 2012:

“No matter what happens, always keep your childhood innocence.”

This wasn’t nostalgia. It was a manifesto.”

The soul of a child is the part of us that approaches life with what my work calls “open awareness”—the capacity to encounter each moment with fresh eyes. It’s practicing imaginative play as adults, which helps us “approach life with childlike open-eyed wonder. And this approach intuitively embraces new ideas.”

It’s the part of us that hasn’t yet learned to be cynical, to protect ourselves through emotional numbness, to mistake conformity for wisdom. It’s the part that still believes in magic, that finds transcendence in ordinary moments, that experiences awe without irony.

The Four Essentials and the Child Soul

The soul of a child intersects perfectly with my Four Essentials (see my book, The Quest) framework:

Body/Physical/Sensuality: Children are unselfconsciously embodied. They experience physical pleasure without shame—running until breathless, eating with gusto, falling asleep wherever exhaustion takes them. My journey toward reclaiming my body’s wisdom, my embrace of tantric practice and psychedelic healing, is a return to this childlike embodiment.

Mind/Mental/Curiosity: Children are voraciously curious. They ask “why?” incessantly, not to be annoying but because they genuinely want to understand. My intellectual restlessness, my endless reading, my constant questioning—these are childlike qualities I’ve fortunately never lost.

Soul/Emotions/Intimacy/Communion: Children form intensely intimate connections without self-protection. They love fiercely, trust completely, express feelings immediately. My need for “table conversations”—intimate, authentic dialogues that prioritize presence over performance—is my adult attempt to recreate the soul intimacy children experience naturally.

Spirit/Spiritual/Freedom: Children haven’t yet been captured by ideology or domesticated by institutions. They experience wonder without theological framework, transcendence without dogma, connection without creed. My leaving of institutional Christianity wasn’t abandoning spirituality—it was reclaiming the childlike spiritual freedom that religion had systematically destroyed.

Why Writers and Poets?

So why do “many poets and writers possess the soul of a child”? Because writing and art-making are acts of sustained attention to reality—the kind of attention children practice naturally but adults must consciously cultivate.

To write well, you must see clearly. To see clearly, you must strip away preconception. To strip away preconception, you must approach reality with the openness of a child encountering the world for the first time.

But there’s more: writers and poets are professional truth-tellers in a culture that runs on pleasant fiction. Like children who blurt out embarrassing truths, writers say the things everyone thinks but no one says. We feel things intensely and then have the audacity—the childlike shamelessness—to say exactly what we feel.

Creativity, as I wrote in one blog post, “is simultaneously limited and limitless… intensely private inner life shared publicly… contains forbidden fruit, wilderness, and a cross.” It’s the willingness to be vulnerable, to expose the tender, undefended parts of ourselves, that children possess naturally and artists must consciously choose.

The Affirmation

The phrase “the soul of a child” finds profound affirmation in my being not as a sentimental notion but as a description of my actual psychological and spiritual architecture.

My extreme sensitivity is childlike vulnerability that never calcified into adult callousness. My stubborn courage is the child’s refusal to accept “because I said so” as a sufficient explanation. My gift as a herald is the child’s clear-eyed pattern recognition unclouded by adult rationalization. My voracious reading is the child’s insatiable curiosity about everything. My need for solitude is the child’s requirement for unstructured time to simply be. My embrace of sensuality and pleasure is the child’s unselfconscious enjoyment of embodied existence.

What the institutions of my first life called immaturity, weakness, or rebellion was actually the soul of a child refusing to be extinguished.

The Invitation

At sixty-seven, having digitized over 700 dreams, decades of journals, thousands of blog posts and social media updates, I see the through-line clearly: my entire life has been a struggle between the domesticating forces of culture and the wild, free, perceptive soul of a child determined to survive.

The memoir I’m creating with Claude isn’t just personal history. It’s an archaeological excavation of what happens when the soul of a child is systematically suppressed—and then, against all odds, finds its way back to the surface in the second half of life.

To possess the soul of a child as a writer, poet, or artist isn’t to be immature. It’s to have successfully protected the most precious part of yourself from the forces that seek to normalize, sanitize, and control.

It’s to still feel the whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside you.

It’s to still sing to birds and read the clouds.

It’s to still believe in magic, even after everything the world has done to convince you otherwise.

And perhaps most importantly: it’s to invite others to remember their own soul of a child—the part of them that got educated out, churched out, spanked out, washed out—and to dare to let it live again.