Ever since I read David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous earlier this year (read it! now!...ok, you can finish what you were reading first), I've been thinking about how removed we are from our local environment. This week, I came across an article that discusses how kids in school are learning about the destruction of rain forests and the melting of ice caps thousands of miles away and how it affects the creatures that live in those areas. But of their own environment? What do they know? They know how to get to the mall.
I want to be able to pass on a love and a comfortableness with being out in the wild to Kidlet. But first I need to get beyond this disconnect that has been growing between me and the outdoors and get back to my roots of running around the forests (except now it would be deserts). Abram suggests learning everything you can about your local environment, its birds, trees, and bugs. I recently received my Peterson's Bird Book and I'm hopefully on my way. This week I saw a barn swallow in my back yard (can I tell you how much I love this bird? So much...). I found out via Knitting Iris that we have Arrowleaf Balsam Root growing in the hills in the springtime. Time to pick up some more guides. Time to get outside and breathe it all in.
4 comments:
Spell of the Sensuous sounds great. will see if my library has a copy. and hurray on your bird book. i saw a bob white in a cemetery. it was alive. and i think it's my first one ever. do you have a list of birds that you've seen?
You crack me up...in the cemetery...it was alive!
Hubby was teasing me and said I need to keep a book with time, date and GPS location of every bird I spot. I did write it down in my scribble journal though.
I think it's also important that the word "environment" isn't synonymous with "nature". There's lots of interesting micro-discoveries to be made in the interstices of "man" and "nature".
Wow. That sounded way more po-mo than I meant it to. I mean: City kids can look around too!
Sorry, Justin, didn't mean to dis the city kids! I should have said nature because that's more of what I was thinking about.
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