Today’s Life-Line is:

A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.

If a child is to keep alive his [or her] inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he [or she] needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him [or her] the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in. [additions mine]

~ Rachel Carson

P.S. And, of course, it works in reverse. Minus the fairies, it is often the little ones who have the capacity to awaken us old folks once again to the wondrous, the beautiful, and the numinous in our midst if we but have the eyes of a child.