But if you want to feed your children's imaginations - make sure they spend hours, every day, outdoors. In every kind of weather.
I've laid in the grass with my children to look at the night sky. (My oldest daughter said that during particularly stressful times at college she would walk up onto the quad and lay down in the grass to look up into the night sky.) I've let them have old wood, and saws, and hammers, and nails, and let them take all of them down to the creek to build bridges. They've played rollerblade hockey in the street with neighbor kids. I made sure they saw lambs being born and goats being born at friend's houses. I tried to rescue baby rabbits with them, and let them catch pesky raccoons to "relocate" away from the house. I made sure they had their own dog. We've grown gardens. I've stood with them on the back porch of our house in Indiana to watch the sky turn green and wonder if we would see a tornado (my dad didn't like that one - I told him not to worry, that I'd heard on the radio that the tornado was in another county (showing him my map), to which he replied, "You know what? That tornado can't read this map.") But he had no room to talk. He has told me many tales of his own adventures with his brothers growing up in a West Virginia coal mining town.
I've let them do all these things and more. And I'm glad.
I read The Maker's Diet by Jordan Rubin years ago. I thought of this passage from it when I read Ch. 2:
"Countless numbers of microorganisms live in the soil, in and on plants, and in the human gut. Inside and out we are at one with the earth (or we should be). What depth of incomprehensible wisdom lies in the biblical statement in Genesis 2:7: "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the earth, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being."
In 1989, Dr. David Strachan, a respected epidemiologist at Britain's London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, launched a tidal wave of debate with a complex theorem of human immunology development and disease control, saying, "We need dirt."
Dr. Strachan proposed that society's growing separation from dirt and germs may well be the cause of weaker immune systems resulting in the growing incidence of a wide range of maladies.
If Dr. Strachan is right (and a growing number of scientists and medical researchers believe he is), then dirt - or to be more specific, the microbes in earth's soil - may be some of our best friends. A recent report in New Scientist said researchers have discovered that microorganisms found in dirt influence maturation of the immune system so that it is either functional or dysfunctional. Technology may be expanding exponentially, but nature is not. We are a part of God's natural creation, so most of us will benefit by returning the missing soil microorganisms to our bodies."
Esolen mentioned the architecture of Roman churches. Eastern orthodox churches are built with a dome to invite symbolic identification with the "dome" of heaven.
This was an inspiring, and fun chapter, and I believe that Charlotte Mason would have enjoyed it immensely. :-)
Favorite lines:
"I was surrounded by a world of change, scarred and pitted, and I loved it, and wanted it never to change."
"Imagine, then, never being able to look upon the sky. That would drive us mad..."
I loved the paragraph on Virginia Woolf and Shakespeare - touche!
Also, this: "The object of our schooling, note well, is not to ensure that such poetry as this will never be written again. Of course it can hardly be written, when it can hardly be read. Our aim is more complete. It is to ensure that the feelings that inspired Hopkins' work will never be understood again." Oh, wow. That last really got to me. It's not just skills, it's emotions.
(And I'll refrain from quibbling over the few little things I disagreed with. ;-)
When I was a girl, I waited for Robin Hood, young Arthur, Edmund Pevensie, Frodo Baggins, and Davy Crokett to come out and play. In my plays, I saw not a rather short, pug-nosed, mousy-brown haired girl. Instead, I was a hero, leading the way over with my sword (a gun on Bunker Hill). I had the bravery to escape from the orphanage, and the courage to lead a band of ruffan-pals (my poor younger brother and sister) in wilds unknown. I provided food, and mysteriously pulled all essentials out of my backpack with everything in it.
ReplyDeleteAnd, strange though it may seem, it was not until this moment that I realized that most of these adventures occurred outside. I braved the rapids of the Mississippi when walking across our creek. I hid behind hollow logs, waiting to ambush my dad when he came home from work.
Thank God for nature. It is suddenly very clear to me that though my imagination would have, and did grow inside, it was the ability to breathe and, particularly important for me, to pace and run, which set my imagination racing.
I LOVED your "backpack with everything in it" - and it must be said that way - never just plain old "backpack"! :-)
ReplyDeleteI think personal experience, as well as science, supports the argument that we need dirt. Sometimes getting more in tune with the elements -- cold, heat, wet, windy, sunny, dirty -- helps me to calm myself, to live at a more normal pace, and to think well.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I wrote my first truly creative piece of writing while sitting on a lawn on a Fall day in Michigan. Leaves were falling, a friend and I were sipping coffee, and all of a sudden my creative juices flowed.
I think it's all due to the dirt. :-)
Maybe it was due to the coffee. ;-P
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