Cultivating Awareness
This morning’s walk brought to mind various snippets of poetry and prose. I was having a running conversation with my bookshelves, even though I was several miles away in the woods. The first visitor was Walt Whitman, from his “Song of Myself”:
Afoot and lighthearted, I take to the open road
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
It didn’t, of course. It went where it wanted, and we willingly followed along. But the sense of possibility those lines exude was with us just the same.
The leaves were so noisy we really had no hope of sneaking up on any animals. But they were beautiful, encrusted with frost and a dusting of snow.
Others had been there before us — sapsuckers…
…the usual assortment of birds, and some mystery mammal that Younger Daughter caught a glimpse of and informed us was large and gray — but not a raccoon. When we got to the creek, we saw fresh tracks, still wet.
We looked in our track book when we got home, but we’re still not sure. A fisher? A marten? I think I saw a mink in this vicinity recently, but mink tracks don’t have five toes. So, the jury is out. Feel free to weigh in.
Whatever it was, it was crossing a creek with interesting ice. I’m always amazed by the magnetism of a creek. The girls will play in a creek all day, in any weather. In the middle of Disney World, if there was a creek, they would turn their backs on the hubbub and play in the water. It’s endlessly fascinating to them.
We headed back with thoughts of math yet to be taught and laundry yet to be done, and Robert Frost spoke in my head:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
but I have promises to keep,
and miles to go before I sleep
and miles to go before I sleep…
At last, we saw something — briefly — other than chickadees and blue jays. But they saw us first, and melted quickly away.
The last writer to whisper in my ear as we got in the car was Aldo Leopold: “Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth?”
We hadn’t seen the fox or the owl or the mink I still dream of seeing. We couldn’t identify the tracks we’d seen. Yet we’d spent an hour immersed in a different, very purposeful web of sights and sounds that invited us to simply notice, and to stretch our understanding beyond the four walls of our house with its many insulating comforts and abstractions. We’d worked to notice the stories of survival and cunning unfolding on all sides of the trail, even where we couldn’t read them very well.
There are lots of things I worry about as a home schooler, lots of ways I need to improve in the various roles I play in my family. But if my children grow up with the awareness of a complex and very beautiful world that surrounds them, that will be something of lasting goodness for them. The fact that they can spend an hour together in cold woods with enthusiasm seems like a good start.
