Reconnecting with the World of Wonders: Go Play Outside

I remember spending time outside as child and playing the role of awed observer to the creatures that inhabited that space. My outdoor habitat included my grandparents’ yard with walk-in cages of canaries or peacocks. Ants and pill bugs making their way across a patio composed of cobblestones. Butterflies meandering through the coneflowers and asters, and bees busy in the lavender. Hummingbirds visiting the each bloom in the hanging potted fuchsias, darting diminutive angles arcing across a rosy sky.

My own yard contained a plethora of sticky caterpillars that feasted on a hedge by our house. We collected them in mason jars filled with their banquet leaves and watch as they crawled and crunched before setting them free. Snails all over my father’s vegetable garden that we would collect for a penny each and place in big buckets for my dad to “transplant” to a different home. The pair of mallards that quacked at my bedroom window each morning and made a home in our yard with the plastic wading pool. A chicken that never laid eggs.

The eucalyptus forest behind my elementary school where squirrels scurried and birds called to one another in repetitive, melodious pleas. Perched in the pungent, oily trees that will always carry the scent of school days.

Morning hikes through a bigger world included deer, turkeys, and an occasional bob cat or coyote. Brown rolling hills dotted with oak trees, and accessorized with tufts of wildflowers: blue lupine, Indian paintbrush and sticky monkey. On the coast, I peered into tidepools. A miniature underwater world composed of colorful characters, slow moving, and spiny and shelled. I watched sandpipers run on stilt legs and pluck up tiny sand crabs. The crabs that escaped bubbling and burrowing through wet, soppy sand massaged by surf. Once in awhile, fat, shiny seals would bask in the surf near a rocky outcropping. Gulls and cormorants taunting one another, taking turns driving from rocks covered in chalky guano.

Now, when I feel a sense of indescribable discontent, a longing for something I can’t name, I wander outside and sit and think. When did I stop being that awed observer? When life got too full of commitments and responsibilities? When I started to prefer creature comforts over creatures? When I grew accustomed to spending my time outdoors drinking instead of exploring and watching? When what was in my glass held my attention and desire over the tiny angular bird dancing with the flowers?

Now that I am sober, I am enjoying my time outdoors again. Time spent observing, not in oblivion. I’m noticing again…appreciating…awed.

I just finished an amazing and beautifully illustrated book, World of Wonders: In praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Each vignette describes an awe-inspiring animal, and her connection with it or how it paralleled her life experiences. It helped me recapture my affinity for the wonderous in our natural world. Reminded me of why I loved being the awed observer.

In her essay “Firefly (Reduex)” she writes of the power of memory tied to a particular creature. For her, it was fireflies. “What a single firefly can do is this: it can light a memory I thought was long lost in roadsides overrun with Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod, a peach pie cooling in the window of a distant house.” Our connection with the outdoors and its inhabitants is deep-rooted and intermingled in our memories of childhood and provides the most vivid and visceral transporting into the past. She goes on to write, “A single firefly might be the spark that sends us back to our grandmother’s backyard to listen for whip-poor-wills; the spark that sends us back to splashing in an ice-cold creek-bed with our jeans rolled up to our knees, until we shudder and gasp, our toes fully wrinkled. In that spark is a slowdown and tenderness…Such a tiny light, for such a considerable task. Its luminescence could very well be the spark the reminds us to make a most necessary turn–a shift and a swing and a switch–toward cherishing this magnificent and wonderous planet.”

Aside from her beautiful writing, reading this book inspires me to spend more time outdoors, and to get my children out there too. In the backyard, at their grandparents’, camping and hiking. Because it’s in the wonderous world that the magic happens. We just need to put down our screens, and go outside to play.