Somebody Come and Play With Me

 When I was about 2 years old, my father made a home movie of me walking around outside on these steps and, “Somebody Come and Play,” was the song he put to the movie. It was always a treat for me to watch. Growing up, every time my father would take out his projector and  load the movie reels me and my sisters would jump up and down in excitement. First we would watch his animation a clay ball that morphed into a  figure,  walked across the screen swallowed a pencil  and returned to his former existence as a solid mass of clay.  Then ultimately the piece de resistance,  me a 2 year old alone  in my winter coat chasing a paper bag with this song in the background: Somebody come and play

Somebody come and play today
Somebody come and smile the smiles
And sing the song
It won't take long
Somebody come and play today

Somebody come and play
Somebody come and play my way
Somebody come and rhyme the rhymes
And laugh the laughs
It won't take time
Somebody come and play today

Somebody come with me and see the pleasure in the wind
Somebody see the time is getting late to begin

Somebody come and play
Somebody come and play today
Somebody come and be my friend
And watch the sun 'till it rains again 

and we would sit around and watch it. I loved it. Yet as I got older, I noticed that the memory elicited a melancholy feeling.  Me, alone at two years old, asking for someone to come and play with me. During my teenage years, it seemed that the isolation I was experiencing as a teenager was directly connected to me as a two year old. Well here I am 29 years later and let me tell you, that lonely feeling I had as a child and as a teenager, has not disappeared and I realized that maybe the loneliness, the sense of being separate from the rest of the world, is not real. Maybe like all other emotions, it is just a feeling that is arising in consciousness and maybe just maybe we are more connected than we believe.

I recently walked into my children’s school and saw a friend and as soon as I saw her I gave her a big smile and said to her will you be my friend? The other people in the room snickered as if to say, “How could you be so needy?” and my response was, “I only say what you feel.” Here we are living in a world that appears  full of separation and loneliness  and we are told that asking for love is wrong. “Don’t put yourself out there…You will get hurt.” But little do we realize that it is in the opportunity of getting hurt that we also have the opportunity of feeling connected. It is vulnerability that allows us to connect because when we are putting up a wall, there is nothing that can break through.  When we allow ourselves  the possibility of connection, there is a chance to be broken but an even greater opportunity to be opened. With this we can grow into the love that we already are.  The loneliness falls away and we are left with a feeling of connectedness with  the rest of the world whether alone or not.