Remembering Nature
When my two young children spend time outside, they aren’t just learning about nature. They are learning the entire world, and they are doing it with brains that aren’t yet preoccupied with putting everything in its right place. That line, the one that separates us from the natural world, is still faint for them, thin and easy to cross over or ignore altogether. It’s a line that probably didn’t exist at all until someone else–a parent or caretaker or sibling–etched it on their minds. Already, within just a few years, I know that line is there, and I know I’ve hatched it over and over for them with warnings about the dangers or messiness of outside. But today, the boundary that separates my children from nature is as small as it’s ever likely to get. And the memories they’ve made so far have been written into their brains without having to cross the boundary that separates them from the earth.
While I can’t be sure how my children’s earliest memories will hold up, I am surprised by how many of my oldest memories involve nature. I’m also shocked by how vivid those glimpses into my past are. I can still see the peeling bark of the white birch trees lining the sidewalk of my childhood home and feel its rough and papery texture between my fingers. I can still see clusters of unripened crab apples lining the back deck and smell the sour-sweet tang that lingered after I crushed them under my bare feet. I can still see delicate purple phlox blooms spilling over the brick walkway and the waxy green leaves of the holly bushes that surrounded the far end of our porch. I haven’t lived in that house or stepped foot in its yard in over thirty years, but I can picture all of those plants clearer than the hackberry I walk by every afternoon when I pick my children up for school. I can recall the banks and rocks of my childhood friend’s backyard creek better than the corners of my own backyard now.
Environmental philosopher Shierry Weber Nicholsen theorizes that our first experiences with the world give us “a place to become a self…[that] gets inside us, providing the very ground of our being as a felt sense of interiority.” Simply put, our first experiences with the world become our first experiences with our own identities. We build an interior world that looks a lot like our early external worlds. The birch and crab apple trees don’t just exist in the yard of my childhood home; I moved them–and the phlox and holly–into my imagination when I began to build my interior world, and now they also exist within me. Even if those trees are no longer standing or the phlox is no longer blooming in the actual world, they still exist, as the poet Rilke writes, “dissolved and distributed inside me.”
The strength and longevity of those first memories likely comes from how young children synthesize the external world. Nicholsen explains that the “childhood world is not primarily a world of language…We take the world of childhood in through all of our senses, as a place that contains smells, textures, warmth and coolness, as well as sights and sounds, all together inside the environment that surrounds us.” Children aren’t concerned with labeling their experiences or even making sense of them. A child’s innate ability to simply exist in a moment serves them well in nature, a place that frequently floods our senses with encounters that are difficult to describe. The natural world’s ability to stop me in my tracks and leave me awe-struck and speechless is one of my favorite aspects of spending time outside. These experiences with awe allow me to code the world in a childlike way–without words, without classification, without anxiety. Like children, when we spend time with nature, we increase our capacity for awe, the ability to experience moments that defy our current understanding of the world. And like children, it is in those speechless moments that we get to learn the world over and over again.
Looking through my photos, I realize I take the same pictures of my children over and over. They are running across a beach, through a wooded trail, along a swampy boardwalk, beside a copse of trees, or into a tide pool. Or they are digging in the dirt or the sand or the marsh grass. The differences in how we process the world becomes clear in those photos. My children are in the moment while I am trying to capture it somehow. I am on one side of the line that separates us from nature while my children haven’t crossed over it completely. But when you consider how wrapped up many of our earliest memories and interior worlds are with nature, and also how threatened the natural world is, our restraint and separation and desire to capture it makes sense. It becomes easier to ignore what is happening to the natural world if we keep it at a distance. It is self-preservation on a level so deep that it’s hard to comprehend. I’m not just concerned about the dying cypress trees in my neighborhood or the methane polluting the atmosphere. I’m also feeling the loss of the white birch and the crab-apple and the phlox and the holly of my childhood. I’m losing a part of myself as well.
It hasn’t occurred to my children to protect themselves and their interior worlds from the nostalgia and grief that will accompany self and world awareness. They are too busy meeting the world to worry about losing it.
Sources:
Shierry Weber Nicholson, Love of Nature and the End of the World
Ranier Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, cited in Nicholsen
