Environmental Stewardship Begins with Heart
Taking a float break to hear stillness. In Stanton County, Nebraska Photo Credit: Jamie Bachmann
Like mother like son. Mud pit on National Mud Day Photo Credit: Jamie Bachmann
December sunrise tea-time contemplations. Photo Credit: Jamie Bachmann
I think we all have ‘the’ story we can trace back through the foggy trail of memory to a collection of moments when we became forever bonded to wild places. Maybe it’s just my experiences, but those moments hover around the ‘unsupervised savagery’ end of the spectrum of childhood memories. Foul smelling mud face paint.
Running through the Platte River riparian zone like a NINJA! Dodging branches and hopping downed trees. I was super human, I could talk to animals and move rocks with my Jedi mind. My parents had no clue I would visit this place.
I wouldn’t be the same without those experiences and I still adventure like this. Midnight forays at 10 below. Jumping the frozen creek, getting tangled in spent brome grass and running up the soybean field to catch the full moon rising over the hill. My heart is eight-years-old in those moments.
Your story may have had an adult to guide you or may include a sibling or neighbor.
Fishing with your brother, or turning over decaying trees with mom to look at centipedes and rollie pollies. Perhaps it was similar to mine, an escape, a place of solitude and imagination shared with no one. Whatever the case, it seems many things have changed since our childhoods. Those changes may be a topic for another post for today seems a day needing inspiration. So I leave you with this little ditty from Rachel Carson’s, ‘The Sense of Wonder’. An ode to the young hearts in our lives and in ourselves.
“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 the 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 disenchantments 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 inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in. Parents often have a sense of inadequacy when confronted on the one hand with the eager, sensitive mind of a child and on the other with a world of complex physical nature, inhabited by a life so various and unfamiliar that it seems hopeless to reduce it to order and knowledge. In a mood of self-defeat, they exclaim, “How can I possibly teach my child about nature-why, I don’t even know one bird from another!”
I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil. Once the emotions have been aroused-a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love- then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more imiportant to pave the way for the child want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate.”
Author: Jamie Bachmann, Wildlife Education, Northern Prairies Land Trust