Rewilding the Young

Learning to walk in the garden again

“Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who made the morning and spread it over the fields. Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.” -Mary Oliver

I spent the morning playing outside with my grandkids the other day while my wife was having breakfast with my daughter at a local restaurant.

We wandered our property, examined the trees that winter’s heavy wet snow brought down. They scooped joy from a honey frame from my soon to be processed honey from last year’s Bees. They played with the Chickens and continue to teach the timid how to pick up and hold the Clucks and dug for Worms to feed the Chickens, a favorite activity of the G-Kids.

It’s moments like these that remind me of the deep and healing wisdom of C.S. Lewis in this quote:

“It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know). A great many people (not you) do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don’t think it is. We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others: but even while we’re doing it, I think we’re meant to enjoy our Lord and, in Him, our friends, our food, our sleep, our jokes, and the birds’ song and the frosty sunrise.”

I asked a young girl from a local crisis shelter I volunteer in if she’d ever fed a Chicken a worm. She told me she hadn’t ever been around a chicken. It made my heart ache to hear her say that. It’s a crime against the future.

Too many kids are disconnected from a rhythm and reality of life that is bursting with so much wonder, excitement and laughter. We must reclaim our Edenic responsibilities less we lose our sense of place and purpose for being. We were created to tend the Earth. We come from God’s very own garden soil. God walked with us in the cool of the day and we too must return to the same practice, walking with our children in wild and beautiful places.

Go to the park, walk a trail, visit a neighborhood garden, go to the river or a stream, plant food and flowers, get pets to caretake, draw wildlife to your home and get a few chickens and feed them worms.

My granddaughter Isla stopped mid-stride as she was moving from one thing to the next as she played and said to me: “Papa, I’m always going to remember what we did today.”

Now that’s a legacy…time together, playing outside. My heart was full.

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