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I live life day to day. I go to class. I go to meetings. I talk to my friends. I do the same things that I do every day. But I often wonder what it would be like to live life as another person. What is it like to be a child in nature? I must use my sympathetic imagination, which is, ìthe ability of a person to penetrate the barrier which space puts between him and his object, and, by actually entering into the object, so to speak, to secure a momentary but complete identification with itî(Bump 85), to jump into the existence of another. I must, as they say, put myself into their shoes, to see the world as they see it. I want to step into the small, precious shoes of a child from my past and out of my adult shoes to see nature in another way. What was it like to be a child in nature? As a child, I was quite involved in nature. My dad loved gardening. Our backyard was always a beautiful collaboration of his favorite plants. We had vegetables growing when we were very young. But even though my dad utilized all of his space for plants, he never left out his kids. On the side of the house, he built my sister, Christy, and I a sandbox.
My sister buries me in the sandbox. Being
young, my sister and I still got along. We
would play in the sand all of the time. As children, we have no worries about getting dirty.
Children have an innocence that overcomes any thought of ruining
clothing. They have more clothes,
right? An adult would feel
differently about this. We would
not want to be buried in the sand. We
would rather watch television or do something productive.
Playing in the sand is not a productive activity to an adult.
Edith Cobb states in The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood,
ìBut the gift of our prolonged human childhood to the family of man is
plasticity of response to environment. This
plasticity of response and the childís primary aesthetic adaptation to
environment may be extended through memory unto a lifelong renewal of the early
power to learn and to evolveî (Cobb 421).
Adults can learn from children to think and act as we did in our own
childhood. When I step into my own
shoes from when I was a child, I step into innocence.
I step into a worldview that states that nothing is important.
Mom and dad will take care of everything and I will do anything and
everything I can get away with. I
will make mud pies and have mud fights. I
will hug the wet dog, run through the sprinkler with my clothes on, and avoid
doing anything that I do not want to do. In
the shoes of a child, life is simple. Life
is exhilarating and life has so much more meaning. Somewhere along the way, we lose that.
Because my dad is a wildlife biologist, we always had lots of
ìcrittersî in and around the house, including turtles.
Now turtles eat minnows (well the bigger ones do).
And what better place to find those minnows, than in the ditch? My brother, sister, and I (and sometimes the neighbors) would
go over to the drainage ditch near our house decked out with wading boots (or
old tennis shoes), buckets, nets, and anything else that could aid us in
capturing the minnows. It was so
much fun. But now as an adult, I
look back on it and think, yuck! I
cannot believe that kids would get smelly and dirty from ditch water.
But that was me when I was young. As
children, we are a part of nature. The
mucky water seems as an extension of our bodies.
But, as adults, it is not. We
do not like to get smelly. We do
all that we can to prevent that from happening.
Parents even want to prevent their own children from getting smelly
dirty. But so what if we are smelly
when we are around nature? It is
natural. We should jump in the dirty water, wrestle with the dog in
the grass, and run until we can no longer run.
That is what makes children, children and that is how they are closer to
nature: they care none but for the
moment. They care for the here and
now and most definitely the here and now in nature.
I am going to swing into the hay. What does this have to do with nature you ask? Everything. We were children with a free spirit: the spirit that nature can bring to any adult. That free spirit gives children the ability to do anything they want to without fear of reprisal, without embarrassment or worries of pain. In nature, adults can reclaim this spirit. We can try and catch minnows with our bare hands. We can laugh when the turtleís attempts to climb onto each other fail and they fall back into the water. We can lie on the grass and stare at the sky without a thought passing through our heads. Thatís the free spirit that we can gain through nature. We may not be able to keep the spirit throughout our daily lives like children can, but we surely can get a glimpse into the mind of a child through nature. The appeal of a little red and black ladybug landing on our shoulder can be as enjoyable to us as it is to children as long as we let it be; as long as we step into the miniature shoes of a child.
Spring break in South Padre - Jalah, Liz, Meg, and me. Many experiences shape who I am. At this point in my life, I absolutely and positively love the beach and ocean. The beach is a place in nature I can go and enjoy myself no matter what the weather is. It could be foggy and drizzly and I would still love to watch the waves roll in. Of course, I love the bright sunny sky with a few wispy clouds and a cool breeze, but I take what I can get. On that type of beautiful day, with the sun shining and the breeze blowing, I can just spread out my towel onto the warm sand and lie in the sun until my skin is golden brown (or bright red). I can just listen to the ocean waves make their awesome, relaxing swish onto the shore. But what is the ocean to a child?
My sister and I with my dad at the beach. My parents would take my siblings and me to the beach. We would pick up shells (hunting for the hard-to-find sand dollars) and splash in the waves with an irreplaceable innocence. Does the ocean still mean the same to me as when I was a child? Maybe. But not totally. In my shoes as a child, going to the ocean was merely a vacation to play in the water, collect seashells, dig holes in the sand, and make pathetic, but great, sandcastles. My parents encouraged us in this. Nature is an important aspect in the world to experience and parents know this. As adults, we know how nature affected us as children, and we want our children to gain the free spirit nature allows us. I, someday, hope to encourage my children in nature as much as my parents did for my siblings and me. When it comes to being an adult on the beach, (though I do love the ocean), I worry about how I look in a swimsuit. I worry about UV rays and skin cancer. I worry about diseases and jellyfish. My innocence is lost. I outgrew that innocence when I outgrew my childhood shoes. Why, as adults, do we lose our passion for the world and nature? Where does this pure and untouched love for everything we do just disappear, as we become adults? I know that many of us still enjoy nature, but do we enjoy it the same way? We think deeply about how nature touches our lives. Children do not. Children think, ìlook at that weird leafî and ìI wonder if I can catch that butterfly.î We think, ìHow does this leaf affect the others that do not look like itî and ìthat butterfly symbolizes my life that has changed in so many ways?î Edith Cobb also states, ìI became acutely aware that what a child wanted to do most of all was to make a world in which to find a place to discover a selfî (Cobb 423). The mind of a child is not complicated. The mind of a child takes things like they are. The mind of an adult is not so. The mind of an adult loses it simplicity. Yes, knowledge is important, but when does a pure love of nature disappear? We shall never know and it will be hard to ever rediscover it in the form that we knew as a child.
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