LAST CHILD IN THE WOODS

A sermon prepared by Rev. Tim Kutzmark
Sunday, April 15, 2007 • Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading

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To trace the history of a river or a rain drop . . .
is to trace the history of the soul,
the history of the mind descending and arising in the body.
In both, we constantly seek and stumble on divinity . . .
I go to nature to be soothed and healed,
and to have my sense put in tune once more.
—John Burroughs

Healing the broken bond between our young and nature
 is on our self-interest,
 not only because aesthetics or justice demand it,
but also because our mental, physical, and spiritual health depend upon it.
—Richard Louv, “Last Child in the Woods”

I can’t help but comment on the irony about to occur.  I’m going to share a few thoughts on the troubling and fascinating book “Last Child in the Woods—Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder.”  This is the book that our Fellowship Committee selected for our first-ever UUCR all church read.  The book’s thesis is very concise: our children, our teenagers—and our adults—our own selves—are hiding indoors.  We are locked away with electronic media, locked away watching the nature channel, locked away surfing and searching the net, locked inside increasing our intelligence with Little Einstein, locked inside studying for MCATs and Advanced Placement Exams, locked inside by fear of what dangers or dangerous people lurk in the woods and open spaces in our towns, locked indoors by an increasingly shrinking expanse of green space that is open and free, locked by regimented sports practices, locked by housing developments that plant a few trees in tiny yards and call it “nature”,  locked by inner city gun fire and drug wars, locked by calendars and schedules that are crammed full and overbooked, locked by too many demands that rob from us unlimited possibilities of unstructured time.

And I can’t help but notice the irony.  Here we are, inside a building, indoor, sitting, thinking about nature.  Talking about nature (we’ll, at least I’m going to be talking about nature, you’re going to be hopefully listening to my words about nature).  We’re going to get caught up in concepts and ideas when this very book we’re reading is telling us that is part of our problem: Our Spirit of Life is draining away because we would rather think and conceptualize, we would rather legislate and reduce, we would rather plan and problem solve, than experience first hand the raw, full, healing, saving glory of our natural world. 

And this, author Richard Louv contends, is why so many of us—young and old and in between— suffer from “Nature-Deficit Disorder.”
 
Poet Robinson Jeffers writes:

A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the Earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again,
I will go down to the lovely Sur Rivers
And dip my arms in them up to the shoulders,
I will find my accounting where the alder leaf quivers
In the ocean wind over the river boulders.
I will touch things and things and no more thoughts.

I contrast those words to these, uttered by a fourth-grader in San Diego.  Asked where she liked to spend her time, she replied: “I like to play indoors better ‘cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.”

In the introduction to his book, Richard Louv writes:

“One evening when my boys were younger, Matthew, then ten, looked at me from across a restaurant table and said quite seriously, “Dad, how come it was more fun when you were a kid?”  I asked what he meant.  “Well, you’re always talking about your woods and tree houses” . . .  At first, I thought he was irritated with me.  I had, in fact, been telling him what it was like to use string and pieces of liver to catch crawdads in a creek, something I’d be hard-pressed to find a child doing these days . . . But my son was serious; he felt he had missed out on something important.  He was right.  Americans around my age, baby boomers or older, enjoyed a kind of free, natural play that seems  . . .  like a quaint artifact.  Within the space of a few decades, the way children understand and experience nature has changed radically . . . Today, kids are aware of global threats to the environment—but their own physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading.  That’s exactly the opposite of how it was when I was a child.  As a boy, I was unaware that my woods were ecologically connected with any others forests.  Nobody in the 1950s talked about acid rain or holes in the ozone layer or global warming.  But I knew my woods and my fields; I knew every bend in the creek and dip in the beaten dirt paths.  I wandered those woods even in my dreams.  A kid today can likely tell you about the Amazon rain forest—but not about the last time he or she explored the woods in solitude, or lay in a field listening to the wind and watching the clouds move.” (pgs. 1-2)

I’ve been haunted by those words since I first read them many weeks ago.  I’ve been haunted by those words as I’ve thought about how little connection my daily life now has to the earth and to the living world around me.  I’m haunted by how de-natured so many of us have become, and how de-natured our children are.  In the last few weeks I’ve reached back into my past, my childhood, and awakened images, smells, sounds, and touches that I’d all but forgotten.  Suddenly, I begin to remember the mystery of my woods growing up, my trees, and my streams.  What did you touch outdoors with your five and six year old fingers?  What did you see, smell, and become one with when you were ten, eleven, and twelve?

I remember a clear brown creek with mossy brown rocks and sleek brown salamanders that would slip out my hands even as I captured them.  I remember bright rusty red sumac, the smell of their bark stripped branches when I’d break them off and skin them to use as magic wands, swords, and stream and hole pokers.  I remember making dams with stones and sticks and mud.  I remember staring deeply into the pools the backed-up water gave us.  I remember chasing lightening bugs on summer nights, and, long after I should have been asleep, watching them flicker in the glass jar between my hands.  I remember digging deep into the creek bank to build forts and hiding places; the full, fecund smell of soil on my feet, my face, my fingers.  I remember the scurry of chipmunks, the call of birds, and the sweet stillness of darkening shadows.

This was my childhood.  It taught me to touch and play and sit and watch and listen and observe, and experiment, and imagine, and be, and be still, and be alone, and be with friends, and be connected to spiders and mice and plants and caves and snake holes and snake skins and bird nests and a dead rabbit and the interplay of sun and cloud and rain and snow.

This was meditation.  This was prayer.  This was God.

Poet Mary Oliver writes:

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?

According to Richard Louv, “Nature comes in many forms . . . a pet that lives and dies; a worn path through the woods  . . .  a damp, mysterious edge of a vacant lot—it offers . . . an older, larger world . . . Unlike television it does not steal time, it amplifies it . . . It serves as a blank slate. . . demanding visualization and the full use of senses.  Given a chance, a child will bring the confusion of the world to the woods, wash it in the creek, turn it over to see what lives on the unseen side . . . Nature is our capacity for wonder . . . [our capacity] to be born [anew]. “

And yet, in a country where the average child spends thirty hours a week in front of a television set or a computer monitor, in a world where our middle-class children no longer look out the windows when riding in cars and SUVs because their eyes are fixed on video screens and video ipods, in a world where our inner city youth might see a few scrawny trees through a locked park fence, the late Edward Reed, a noted psychologist warns: “We are beginning to lose the ability to experience our world directly.” (p. 64). 

Richard Louv writes: “As the young [and adults] spend less and less of their lives in natural surroundings, their senses narrow, physiologically and psychologically, and this reduces the richness of human experience.  Yet, at the very moment that the bond is breaking between the young and the natural world, a growing body of research links our mental, physical, and spiritual health directly to our association with nature.” (pgs. 2-3) 

In the early 1800s, Universalist social activist and  “mental-health pioneer Dr. Benjamin Rush, declared ‘digging in the soil has a curative effect on the mentally ill.’” (p. 45)  More recent studies prove that surgery patients recover faster if they look out at trees and greenery (p. 46).  Other studies show that spending time in nature reduces stress levels in adults (p. 46, 49), and that just watching fish swim lowers blood pressure (p. 45).  The Institute for Child and Adolescent Development, in nearby Wellesley MA, suggests that nature plays “a significant role in helping traumatized children.” (p. 51)  Still more “studies suggest that thoughtful exposure . . .  to nature can . . . be a powerful form of therapy for attention-deficit disorders, [depression, behavioral issues] and other maladies.  As one scientist puts it, “we can now assume that just as children need good nutrition and adequate sleep, they . . . need contact with nature.” (pgs. 2-3)

Direct experience is the source of so much wellness in children and in adults.  Robin Moore, from the National Learning Initiative, reminds us that: “Sensory experiences link the child’s exterior world with their interior, hidden, affective world.  Since the natural environment is the principal source of sensory stimulation, freedom to explore and play with the outdoor environment through the senses in their own space and time is essential for healthy development of an interior life.” (p. 65)

Rick Bass, who now lives in the wilderness of Montana, writes powerfully of his childhood and of moment in nature that shaped him forever:

“I was probably nine or ten years old, and it was New Year’s Eve.  We were staying in the hunting camp’s ramshackle old shed.  There’d been an ice storm that day, and . . . the whole world [seemed] encased in a sheet of ice—and the adults, my uncle and father and grandfather, were inside playing dominoes by gas lamp, and they sent me down to the creek with a flashlight to get a bucket of water.  The night was filled with . . . fog, especially down along the creek . . .There were flocks of geese . . . circling overhead, looking for a place to land but perhaps unable to descend through such dense fog.  I think they were circling our cabin’s lone lantern, which must have been the only light they could see below.

“The little creek was frozen; I was going to have to break through the ice with a rock to gather water.  Before I did, though, I noticed that I could see fish underneath the ice—pale little bluegills, bloodless-looking, caught in the beam of the flashlight, finning in place.  The flashlight’s beam passed right through them.

“Everything was the same color, everything was transparent or translucent—ice, water, fish, flashlight beam—and I lay there on my belly watching those fish through the ice, and I had never seen before how complex but also how ordered is the stacking of the world: of all the layers and levels of the world, and all the worlds-beneath-worlds.

“Somewhere above me it was a clear night with stars, and the geese were up in that world, circling and looking; and then below that, there was a skin of fog wrapped around the earth; and on that frozen earth was a small boy with a flashlight; and with the probe of that flashlight’s beam traveling through and then beneath the skin of the ice there was creek water running beneath; and in that cold water there were those little fish, their tails ruddering them in place, fish hanging suspended in that one probe of light, as if the light was the ice, and they were captured, their world revealed.  And behind me, up on the hill, the world of men and manhood, my uncle and father and grandfather were playing dominoes, safe and warm in the cabin of yellow window square light, while I was out in the cold, alone for the moment but also not alone, listening to and seeing all these different worlds at once and knowing that some were calling to me louder than others, and that I could choose, or be chosen by, any one of them.”   (Rick Bass, “A Texas Childhood”, from The Best Spiritual Writing 2004, pgs. 7, 8, 9)

What calls to us?  What calls to us from childhood memories?  What calls to us from outside our windows and wall?  What calls to us from inside the hearts of our children?

Will we give our children, our grand children, our great grandchildren, our nieces, our nephews the open spaces and unstructured time to wander and wonder between the worlds of nature and imagination and spirit?

Will we give ourselves, our spouses and partners, our friends and loved ones the open spaces and unscheduled time to wander and wonder within the worlds of nature and imagination and spirit?

Will we—and will our children and our children’s children—know the healing touch of dusky soil, the sacred sound of a screeching night owl, the taste of blueberries freshly plucked from the side of the path, the smell of midnight in a pine forest, the sight of sunrise on a winter beach: the truth that can only be found when we wonder and wonder through life?

Will we—young and old, female and male, gay and straight, able-bodied and wheelchair bound, jock and bookworm and computer geek—will we know what it means to be made whole by the interconnected web that is all creation?

Will we—as a Unitarian Universalist people of faith—return to the land, to the earth mother, to the roots from which we all sprang?

Will we, and those who come after us, experience firsthand what poet Wendell Berry knew as he wrote:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

May it be so.  Blessed Be.  Amen.

Copyright 2007© Rev. Timothy A. Kutzmark
All rights reserved