“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” Rachel Carson
Yesterday I had the privilege of attending the final hour or so of our church’s Earth Camp at our retreat center, Koinonia, near Annandale. I arrived around lunch time to find a group of campers headed back from the dining room to their cabin. Instead of walking along the paved path, they headed directly into the woods. When one young girl saw me walking from my car, she threw up her hands and waved. “It’s me! Emma!” I see her nearly every Sunday. And yet she must have thought that, here in the woods, I would not recognize her. I greeted her and the other campers and watched as they turned and walked into the grove of trees, their feet making a silent path on dirt, stone and dead leaves. Over the last few days, they had become children of the woods.
A little later, as we gathered for a closing worship time, I asked the campers to tell me what they had experienced, what they had learned, what new thing had come to them over their days at Earth Camp. I heard tales of fishing, boating, swimming. I heard about how they had learned about recycling, how to use energy more responsibly, how to be more careful about their garbage. Others talked about how they had learned to walk more gently on the Earth. One girl said she had been frightened of the daddy-long-legs that had been near her bed but then learned that they ate the mosquitoes. She swore they had saved her from being bitten!
When I watched their young faces light up with the stories of new friends and all the fun they had had, I felt so grateful that these young ones had been given the gift of being in the woods. Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, writes about saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. He speaks of all the children who never have the chance to walk aimlessly on wooded paths, observe birds and other small animals in their natural habitat, experience their human connection with a daddy-long-legs. He says: “The child in nature is an endangered species, and the health of children and the health of the Earth are inseparable.”
As I helped these children load their now dirty belongings into the vans that will take them back to well manicured lawns and city and suburban neighborhoods, I felt a sense of hope. Hope for the children and for the Earth. While not all children will have the experience of watching the small toads hop from shore to water home or see the Great Blue Heron land its enormous body on a nest just feet away from where they are swimming, these twenty-seven children had. Their band-aided knees and bug-bit arms and legs showed the signs of an encounter with nature. And it was good, very, very good. Perhaps they will tell their friends and next year a whole new crop of children will head to the woods to learn, to have fun, to be changed. The connections will be made again and reinforced that we humans are guests on this precious planet. We share our present and our future with creatures with many legs, enormous wings, and fragile lives.
And we are all in it together.