free rein parenting

Go Outside

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

One of the cool things about seeing your writing appear in a magazine is reading what writers your words butt up against. Taproot, always a lushly artistic production, has an essay by Milla Prince (what a knock-out name) about what I’ve been ruminating upon: our need for immersion in nature is so primal and so necessary – for all of us, infants to the truly very old. Far beyond the antidote to whatever may be ailing my own waning soul at times, I crave unfettered sky, cold clouds, an unfenced expanse to walk, frog slime on my fingers.

Which brings me back, again, to my recurring theme that, much as we might perceive ourselves as separate entities – beings complete in ourselves – we cannot be lifted from our landscape, cut out and pasted like stick figures. I’m as much part of the mountain I live on as I am a woman at my kitchen table.

There is some integral part of us that is nourished only by interacting with nature, some part of us that longs for our ancestral home, before our fall from “paradise,” before making ourselves the outsiders in our natural environment… Separated from the mycelial networks that connect all life to itself, severed from other beings by the walls of our houses, our paved-over streets, we truly are lonely.

– Milla Prince, “A Ritual of Woods & Fields” in Taproot: Wander

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The Girls’ Landscape Widens

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 2 Comments

The school day was unexpectedly cancelled for my sixth-grader this week, and so, while I was working in the air-conditioned world of Burlington, my daughter spent the steamy September day at a friend’s house, doing what she described as “all kinds of things.” Those things included cribbage and trampoline, but also biking down the dirt road to Number 10 Pond to swim.

At the day’s end, I drove out of Burlington’s traffic, along I-89, and through Montpelier’s end-of-day busyness, and then I was in some of my favorite local terrain, the small but steep hills of Calais and Woodbury, where the land rises right out of the myriad ponds, and forests abruptly give way to valley views, where old stone walls mark tended fields, and gardens with giant sunflowers, their heads bent down down, are profligate at this time of year.

I passed almost no traffic on these dirt roads, until I met the two 11-year-old girls, sweatily pushing their bikes up a final slope, soaked and sandy towels wrapped around handlebars, their faces radiant.

These two friends had biked a fair distance, zipping down hills, surrounded by the beginning of autumn’s easing-to-gold beauty, to the pond surrounded by woods where “only old ladies” were swimming. I could imagine the water’s stillness, and how sweet and cool it would feel on hot and dust-covered skin.

Those were my two pieces of Vermont that day. Before leaving the friend’s house, the girls and I talked for a little while, the humidity thick, drawing up the scents of soil and plant, the girls’ faces flushed from their travels and ready for more adventure.

… I don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.

– Lucille Clifton

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