The Child in Each of Us.

(click on poster to watch trailer )

      I recognize myself on the face of lost children—sad children, with eyes that beg an answer to unanswerable questions: Why am I here? Where are you, mother? Why did you leave me here so alone? I am two years old, four, five, ten, twelve, fifty-nine. 

The questions are still there, reverberating through the years, but now I am certain that there isn't an answer—or maybe there is, but it is not what I expected. 

     There is no rhyme or reason for anything that happens to us except for the magical explanations we created to make this life bearable. Desperate to feel nothing disturbing, others of my kind invented positive thinking, telling me sometimes: " I like to deal with positive people." I just smile. "I know," I think, but I say nothing in response. 

     It hurts feeling life to its fullest so they need all the help they can get: alcohol, drugs, sugar, bread, coffee, positivity, visualization, God. 

     I hear, see, and read in comments throughout the fabric of social media. The "hurting ones" professing God's power and benevolence as the Los Angeles streets fill with tents and trash and homeless people. We have so much in common with the children of the documentary " A House Made of Splinters trying to make sense of their place in the world while every wall surrounding you reminds one of how immense life is. Children need to be socialized into the standard magical narrative of the community in which they live, but orphan children learn only about reality.  

     I sit in a European café and watch people come and go, so sure of themselves, creating their Shangri-las—some young, some old. 

     I watch them and ponder whether they believe it will hold for a lifetime, the thin, brittle magic veil of delusion they wear to keep life at bay.