But we are usually not aware that when we look back in time, our penchant for pattern-making leads us to be selective about which memories have meaning. And we do not always make the right selections. We build our story - our model of the past - as best we can. We may seek out other people’s memories and examine our own limited records to come up with a better model. Even then, it is still only a model - not reality.

Everything that you can think in the face of your childhood, is right. Everything that makes more of you than you have heretofore been in your best hours, is right. Every heightening is good if it is in your whole blood, if it is not intoxication, not turbidity, but joy which one can see clear to the bottom. Do you understand what I mean?

The child is a living image, in and of the present, not only a historical fact. I emphasize the imaginal child because ordinarily we assume that talk about childhood is personal history.

In general, Hillman defined memory as a form of imagination. As you remember what life was like as a child, you are reimagining your past life and returning to a child’s way of seeing the world. The child is always present but comes to the surface at the appropriate times.

Ghosts of our pasts—our grandparents and their grandparents as well as the ghosts of their lives—inhabit the frames. They and their beliefs, interpretations of scenes, words, and feelings haunt the frames of lives as surely as the roses, figs, and lemon drops of our present daily lives do.