“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
– Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder
With abundant snow and ice these past weeks, children have taken over the streets. And the hillsides. And the front yards. So many of them outdoors, bundled in warm layers, cheeks ablaze. One I witnessed hauling a sled full of littler kids in the empty lot across from the funeral home, all of them shrieking in unfettered exhilaration.
My next-door neighbor’s three daughters are constructing an igloo, and it’s a work of art, a wonder of this world. They’re out in the backyard well into dusk, wedging squares of ice they’ve fastidiously assembled into a dome-shaped shelter. When I inquired about it, the youngest one explained it was going to have four rooms, one or each of them, plus a kitchen.
Packs of kids at Mint Springs zip down the hill on sleds, coats, trash bags, whatever they can find. They’re figuring things out on their own, discovering the joy of innovating. Yesterday, a gang of middle schoolers roamed the streets in bright coats and mittens volunteering to shovel people’s driveways for free.
But we so rarely witness children doing children things with no adult in sight. We seem to need to hover, to guide, to steer them. We have forgotten, in all our busyness and push for success, to just leave them alone. We have forgotten that if we do, nature can become their teacher. What if we could step aside and proclaim every Saturday morning a “snow day”? I suspect this would allow a kind of expansiveness that looking at a screen quite literally ravages.
What if we routinely granted our children significant blocks of time for unstructured play outdoors, for making it up as they go? Perhaps that would be the greatest gift we would ever give them. And the greatest assurance of their future on a livable planet. As environmentalist Rachel Carson established, “The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.” (The Sense of Wonder)
Carson knew, as we do, that children who are disconnected from the out-of-doors are very unlikely to be concerned about nature. She rightly laments, “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.” (The Sense of Wonder)
A hummingbird’s heart beats over 1,000 times a minute. The bones of a pigeon weigh less than its feathers. Porcupines float in water. Oh, what glory surrounds us! Yet, we seem to have lost the ability to embrace it with our hearts. We approach the world with our minds. We do so with insistence and pride. We want to know, to master, to become experts.
And sadly, we model this for our children. We make lists. We get things done. Our technology reminds us that we can be more efficient with every update. When my computer warns that it’s time to experience the new personal intelligence system, I jump to it like a well-trained seal. I’ve just grown used to it, numb, maybe.
In the forward to the 2007 edition of Silent Spring, Terry Tempest Williams reminds us, “Carson foretold the dangers of cruelty of humans to the earth. She wrote of the need for opposition to it. She was a woman overbrimming with love for the sea, lichens, rocks, and sand. With her we are in the presence of a mind that is sparked, fueled, not by facts and logic, but by something much more mercurial, something as charged and unstable and risky as intuition.”
Let’s visit those words again: sparked not by logic but by intuition.
Children are masterful at this. They trust the sacred and mysterious as much as they do the factual. One blustery March morning decades ago, driving in the car, my children in the backseat, Garland told Emma, with stalwart conviction: “The wind comes from the trees.”
She nodded in utter agreement. They were looking at blowing oaks and shaking poplars and came to that solution with observation and heart and instinct.
Emma and Garland are grown now: 23 and 26. But I remember how when they were little, strangers would assail me with advice. I needed to savor every moment. I needed to cherish each day. I needed to understand they are only little once. These are the best days, they counseled, smoothing the clean sleeves of their ironed shirts. Meanwhile, wiping sweet potato mush from the table, I hoped beyond hope that at least one of them would take a nap that day. I wanted an hour to myself. A half hour. Five minutes to just think. So, I know not to sugarcoat the real labor of parenting, not to romanticize the hardest job you’ll ever do.
Last spring I hung Garland’s clothes on the line. He had left a heavy-duty leaf bag on his bedroom floor, just home from his first year of college. Even though my rational side knew I shouldn’t, I chose to regard the task as a kind of gift, a mission, something I could do that would reconnect the two of us, take us back to wiffle ball afternoons.
I drug the thing to the basement—plop plop plop—and sorted by color. I started the first load and pressed my ear to the drum as months of dorm life churned into the warm water. It’s dank down there, with barely enough room to stand up, the metal ductwork, innards of the house, suspended like gargoyles inches from my head. This is when it dawned on me that his leaving, his coming home, the sheer fact of this man-child of mine, the whole way time spun forward, is outlandish. He is more alive now than I will ever be again.
There’s really no comparison for it, nothing like it.
The clothesline’s beside the field where afternoons we practiced for the years he played little league. I’d throw wiffle balls while he taught me the moves to the game. It was where I learned the most about his life. That the woman who always wore a whistle around her neck at school was not the gym teacher. That the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz really did have a brain. That he was going to catch the biggest fish ever known to man. I let him be the leader, let his heart be our guide. Blessedly, I did not correct a thing on that uneven, overgrown field.
I hung the clothes on the line, pinning both sides of each shirt, the cuffs of his pants, the waist of his shorts. I stepped back and admired the prayer flag resplendent in the May sun: green, grey, red, blue. Earth, air, fire, water. Some of his clothes were bright and fluorescent, the color of fishing lures.
They waved, not a promissory note, but a confirmation: Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself. (Kahlil Gibran, On Children)
So I would just encourage those raising children to be gentler with yourselves. Play with abandon. Be frivolous. Let your children take the lead. Get outside with no agenda. Let yourself be a child again. Those unchoreographed afternoons with my young son have lasted, brilliantly lit rooms in my mind. Because I followed his lead.
Carson explains, “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 alienation from the sources of our strength.” (The Sense of Wonder)
In July of 1956, Woman’s Home Companion (price 35 cents) published an essay by Carson entitled Help Your Child to Wonder. Amidst advertisements for Johnson & Johnson cotton balls housed in a tin can and recipes for potato salad resides remarkable and timeless parenting guidance. It’s short and to the point: “It is not half so important to know as to feel.”
Recently I became strikingly aware that we are all living in a condition of extremity, personal and public. Everything feels off-kilter. Children absorb this, even more than us, I suspect. Take all the stress you feel, the worries you hold, and then take away the perspective of years lived. It would be utterly terrifying.
So, what can we do to help them? Let them play outside. Unstructure their time. And take them on a dirt road for a puddle walk.
On one such walk, there were cows. Number 29 looked at us suspiciously like she thought we were behind the decision to move her to this pasture without the round bale, the one further from the creek where she likes to shift and circle, then lie above the water in the late afternoon sun. She’s the color of butterscotch, of light on broom sedge, and between her mascaraed eyes is a cyclone of fur so stately it’s almost implausible. When I touch her, it smells like childhood, like bread just out of the oven. Like we could go on and on without worry.
We abide a long time, minutes, just the three of us, the rest of the herd gathered beside the barn near the western gate. In the adjacent orchard hundreds of peach trees are poised to burst open in a show of pink so lustrous it’s enough to break open your heart and fill it with awe and wonder.
Find more perspectives on parenting, or visit Virginia Summer Camp to explore opportunities to foster outdoor exploration and connections for your children.
CHARLOTTE MATTHEWS is an associate professor at the University of Virginia and recipient of the Adele F. Robertson Award for Excellence in Teaching. She is the author of five poetry collections, a novel, and a memoir, which was a finalist for Indie awards best creative non-fiction. Her work has appeared in such journals as American Poetry Review, The Mississippi Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Story South. Her honors include fellowships from The Chautauqua Institute, The Sewanee Writers Conference, The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and The Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Matthews teaches writing classes and directs the Writing Center for the School of Continuing and Professional Studies.