Curatives

Exhausted by a daylong carnival fundraiser at the kids’ school, my husband slept (relatively) late Sunday morning. I drug myself from the nest of our warm bed downstairs to monitor the volume of the kids comparing their candy stashes. They were rapidly moving toward an “it’s no fair” argument. But I threw out the grand prize from the silent auction: a Playmobil airplane. Now all six of them are working together to put it together and to people it with figures from their collection. A rare moment.
Their cooperative play gave me enough time to read this in Magnificat this morning:

To the eye that sees, littleness reveals infinitely more than vastness. God is known more truly by a little finite creature through the contemplation of a snowdrop than through the contemplation of the universe. Very soon the intellect staggers before immensity, it is used up, exhausted, only the rare heart responds to it at all. But the inward eye fills with light when it contemplates a little thing, the heart can fold upon it, and so the heart expands and the mind does not wither, but puts out petal upon lovely petal of thought. . . . If you ever had a little green tree frog and watched him puffing out with a pomposity worthy of a dragon before croaking, you must have guessed that there is a tender smile on our heavenly Father’s face, that he likes us to laugh and he laughs with us; the frog will teach your heart more than all the books of theology in the world.

 From Caryll Houselander, whose little Reed of God is a revelation of beauty in itself.

Perhaps this meditation stuck out because I’ve been reading Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv. I’d seen it on a number of lists, and when the ranger at the Sandhill Crane preserve highly recommended it, I checked it out from the library (I think she meant for me to buy it in the gift shop – instead I bought Scary Stories from the South, which more than one of us will enjoy). Houselander articulates briefly in a paragraph the highest purpose and necessity of nature, which Louv attempts to communicate in a less poetic book with lots of studies and anecdotes, but without ever really spelling out the connection between nature and the eternal.

Not that Louv doesn’t make a lot of good points. Even after reading only a few pages, I felt an urgent need to send the kids outdoors to play. I don’t want them suffering from nature deficit disorder. And they could all use a hit of nature to make them more cheerful and peaceful. We’re a family without a lot of tech gadgets or good TV reception. But sometimes my kids want to stay instead and play Legos or read books more than they want to go outside. Louv pointed out the fact that a/c and central heating deters kids from leaving their controlled climate, an issue here, but since I keep our thermostat at frugal temps, I suspect my kids stay indoors more for other reasons. Perhaps number one is that I can’t let them just bike aimlessly around the neighborhood like I did as a kid. I’m too afraid, both of molesters and of fearful, well meaning, spoilsport neighbors.


Then again, Louv points out that a lot of these fears are unfounded and based on misperceptions of the frequency of random acts of violence.


I suppose I shouldn’t automatically assume a defensive position when I read this book. My oldest are just now hitting the age when they can be a little more independent, and I do let them go fish on the pier and bike to the Air Force Base without me. I make the littles go outside when they’re too noisy. We go to the beach and camping and on hikes. In our old neighborhood, the kids used to play in the swamp and on rocks at Plum Point Park, as I ran around in circles on the road. I don’t really fear that my kids will lack a connection with nature, but I do fear that their opportunities to have free access to green space to play freely will continue to shrink.


When I was little, my parents moved counties to a more rural area, next to a vacant lot. We made a small trail and a stick house in the brambles. We watched may apples die to make room for violets and then for goldenrod. We ice skated on the pond next door (to the neighbor’s consternation). We rode bikes on county roads. And then one day someone bought the lot next door and built a house. And eventually, after I was grown, my parents’ bought 40 acres – a good part of it a big vacant lot.


So we go there when we can to get a dose of nature. I hope my kids have memories of time spent outdoors there and the other places we haul them to. While I may not finish reading Louv’s book because I don’t need to be convinced of the importance of unstructured time spent connecting with God’s creation, I’m thankful for the reminder to encourage to look for little things to contemplate.