“I learned to value only that which truly activates what is in my heart.  I came to value those experiences which activate my heart as it really is.  I sought, more and more, only those experiences which have the capacity, the depth, to activate the feeling that is my real feeling, in my true childish heart.  And I learned slowly, to make things which are of that nature.“

[Christopher Alexander :: The Nature of Order, The Luminous Ground]

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A friend emailed this quote to me recently and it prompted pages and pages of writing over a period of two weeks.  I began to compile a list of the things my childish heart prefers — that is to say, the things I cherished when I was a child, not really objects, mostly daily experiences I had while growing up on remote warden stations in the National Parks of Canada.  I want to share some of that list with you now!

My true childish heart prefers:

*playing alone, most of the time (which isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy playing with others — I was prone to wandering off on my own, and was content to be so)

*being in boreal forest (a spruce, jack pine and birch blend is nice)

*star gazing and wondering at the northern lights

*beaver ponds, narrow creeks, mossy forest floors

*tall grass, or a tall crop (wheat, canola, flax) — standing in tall grass or a tall crop

*collecting rocks, twigs, bugs, wings, feathers, bones, tadpoles, frogs, frog eggs, crayfish, leeches

*building snow forts, snow caves, forts in hay bale stacks, forts in aspen stands

*building, in general

*the sound of ruffed grouse drumming

*falling asleep to the songs of wolves and coyotes

*riding horses bareback

*fishing

*cleaning fish, generally dissecting things and investigating the insides of animals

*making whistles with caragana pods, blades of grass, reeds

*watching my dad do woodsman things: pack a packhorse, run a chainsaw, chop wood, build a fire, ride a horse, drive a snow machine, shovel dirt, gut a fish…

*climbing trees

*reading books

*rubbing the cheeks of rabbits (which brings them great pleasure and causes them to grind their teeth which sounds a bit like a cat purring)

*being under overturned canoes on the edge of a lake in a thunderstorm

*swimming

*twirling on ice while figure skating

*running/going places fast

*morning light filtering through a tent wall

*peppermint tea

*sewing

*any kind of baby animal, the wilder the better, rabbits especially

*keeping hens and collecting eggs

*hunting for the secret place the cat hid her new litter of kittens

*the sound of horses chewing oats

*cooling off in the horse trough on a hot summer day

*being made meek by a sudden storm

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At times, my childhood seems a lifetime ago.  A girlfriend of mine, last summer, asked me what I was like when I was a little girl.  When I went to answer her question, I realized I’m the same person (in most ways) as the little girl who grew up feeling she owned Riding Mountain National Park.  My life isn’t much different either.  I still spend hours out on the land, most days.  I like peppermint tea.  I make whistles out of grass blades and it seems there’s never a moment when I’m not exploring…or noticing the world around me.  I know I have been changed, burdened, and freed, time and time again, by life experiences and interactions with humans, by loving and losing and loving and losing.  But the changes have not been for the worse, but for the beauty of growth and betterness.  I’ve been able to keep a good grip on my true childish heart, more than most, and I’m thankful for that.  I don’t feel I’ve lost my way in adulthood, I’m thankful for that too.  Who were you when you were young?  Who are you now?  Who would you rather be?  I have been turning these questions over and over in my mind, pressing at the answers like they are rumpled cotton beneath a hot iron; they lay out before me now, crisp and white, new and beautiful, ready for the wearing.

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On Friday morning, I went up Gibson Jack.  It was a wonderful, woolie spring day.  The creek was ripping right along, fat with snow melt and rain.  The trees were beginning to think about buds and root-moving-rock-splitting.  After exploring the creek and laughing at the antics of the dogs, I laid down on the forest floor and watched the sky through the trees, simply being restful, aware and allowing my senses to drink in the world around me.  I thought to myself:

Not enough people take the time to simply linger a little longer in the wild places.  We pass through the forests, across the plains, under the arms of the mountains — we hurry on our way to somewhere.  We forget to notice the sky and feel the wind.  It would be better for us to linger, every now and again, to afford ourselves a full taste of the world around us, to slow our heartbeats and sink gently into the earth.  Maybe, if we’re lucky, we will remember our true childish hearts, and feel a spirit of youth and freedom rise up in us.

This morning, the sky is wild and tumbling.  It makes me moody and introspective.  I am out walking.  When I dip down into the cottonwood stand in the dry gulch of Cusick Creek, the wind sounds like a far off freight train that never quite arrives.  I look to the tops of the trees as they groan and rattle.  It’s amazing, the strength of trees, the vertical stairways of flexible cambium beneath the brittle and frayed edges of bark, the way they can bend so deeply without breaking.  I wonder what there is in me that manages the same kind of strength, what it is about my structure that allows me to stand up to a devil of a wind as it rakes and lashes at me?  There’s a new cottonwood down, probably a victim of weather; I wonder if it was simply overcome, or if it gave up?  Can trees give up?  Though they live a life of service, I tend to believe surrender isn’t in the nature of trees, or anything wild and natural for that matter.  Maybe humans are different because we can suffer the infliction of a crushed and broken spirit? (there is the matter of domestic animals which, at the hands of humans, can suffer crushed spirits and are therefore in a separate category from wild animals and human beings)  There’s a kind of broken, terrible bad in some people that just spreads, like a virus, into others, crushing as it goes.  I don’t see the same sort of affliction in nature.  There is always a will to survive.  A coyote in a trap will chew its foot off.  There is never a question of when to give up and let go.  Even when wild animals are dying, at the teeth and claws of each other, or at the hands of a hunter, they continue to fight for life.  There is only the effort of living, every moment of every day.  It’s amazing.  I take notes.  Copious amounts of field notes.

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This beautiful world of mine is washed in muted hues: stony violet, chalk, drab taupes and tans, vague greens and the occasional patch of gold where the light hits a mountain peak or a clump of sage.  It’s stark and madly howling out here.  The colors are just as I love them: fleeting, shifting, melding, brewing, perhaps even indignant, as though they do not want the added contrast of bright light to birth them into full strength.  They cannot be captured.  They run rampant in the hands of the wind, flickering and mutating, they scurry on the ground like a thousand velvet voles.  My attempts to describe them are in vain.  They leap in and out of appropriate adjectives as the sun pushes forth from behind cloud sail, and then slides into cover again.

Tater Tot is galloping about like a little psychopath.  His eyes have the crazy look he’s infamous for.  He disappears into the sage and in a moment I hear him yipping for joy.  A covey of Hungarian partridge bursts into the air and is carried away like grains of pepper in the terrifying gusts of wind.  Tater Tot commences his chase.  I don’t have the heart to call him in.  He is joyful, the way a trout is joyful when it leaps out of water for the sake of feeling the sky rub at its rainbow flanks.

I turn my back to the wind and take my hair out of the clip that holds it.  Instantly, my sight is covered in gold silk, I have hair in my mouth, hair stuck to my lips, it stands up on end as the wind rolls over and under it.  I’ll have to use a garden rake to get the knots out when I take my bath in the evening, but it’s worth it to feel free and unfettered for a moment.  I’m like a mustang in the high desert sage flats, sure footed, strong and replete with life.  I sling my camera strap over my shoulder, call Tater Tot in to my side, and break into an easy jog on a frozen trail.

I head east-southeast, toward the growing light of the day.