The importance of Vitamin N

My book list this year is getting off to a slow start. First book of the year: Richard Louv's The Nature Principle.  Like This Is Where You Belong, it didn't provide a new cause to take up, but it strengthened my resolve to put a higher priority on doing activities that take us outdoors. My kids are tired of hearing me talk about "Nature Deficit Disorder."

Louv's book takes the ideas behind his first big hit, Last Child in the Woods, and applies them to a wider scope.  Kids aren't the only ones who need to engage with the natural world regularly in order to learn, create, and be well; everyone does.  Louv does the research to show how important time spent outdoors - or even just in the presence of plants and pets - is to mental wellbeing, emotional health, and creativity.  He describes the efforts of health professionals to prescribe "Vitamin N" in order to preserve health and promote healing. He provides lots of examples of people who have made a conscious effort to not just save the environment but to help people interact with it. One of the parts that stuck out to me was his description of the change within the environmental movement.  First generation environmentalists were all about protecting the environment from the encroachment of people. People and nature are at odds in this dialectic.  Then environmentalists began emphasizing personal responsibility: recycle, buy less or buy green.  Now the movement is attempting to reconnect people and the environment. How can we treasure what we have? How do we live with it?

Sometimes I default to thinking that spending time in nature means being immersed in the woods, camping or hiking, a backpacking trek. The title of Louv's last book may have perpetuated that idea. But Louv shows that even time in a garden or yard provides "Vitamin N." A bike ride, a trip to the beach, or a walk around the neighborhood can have a similar restorative power. We don't have to get into extreme sports to engage with nature. Walking the same route often helps us see the changes in the seasons, the amount of growth or decay from month to month. I don't take advantage of our proximity to the beach as much as I should. We met up on the beach with friends the other day for the moms to exercise and the kids to play in the sand. They had a great time, (Although the little toy snow shovel we brought was a source of contention. Why do I even still have this thing? As a sand shovel it doesn't function very well, but it is bigger and more attractive to three-year-olds than small plastic sand shovels.)

Some places make engaging with nature easy. In northern Illinois, we lived close to one of the many forest preserves. I used to walk the paths, often with the older kids in the baby jogger, and feel a million miles from the city. In Indiana, the year of Dan's graduate school, our rental house backed up to a big ravine that separated our neighborhood from a big city park. The boys played soldiers and explorers for hours back there. In Guam we had the jungles. In Mississippi, desserted lots. Both our homes in California have been close to mountain trails that we try to take advantage of.

That said, the younger kids complain everytime I say, "Let's go on a hike!" They hate getting dragged along on a forced march, although during the actual event we have great conversations, and they seem to enjoy being there and doing something. The older kids now want to go hiking on their own, and I hope the younger kids will eventually feel the same way.  But I do need to remember that we don't have to spend two hours on a trail to engage with nature.  Just playing in the park is good enough. And I need to branch out a bit and try new things.  We've never gone skiing. One son went rock climbing and river rafting with scouts and loved it.  Fishing from the pier, paddle boarding, biking down the strand, taking a picnic to a new park are all ways that we could spend time outdoors together.

Just being outside together, not in front of screens, is enough.

Counting for something

On Friday NPR did a short feature about the retiring chief of police of LA, William Bratton. He came to LA from NYC, and cleaned up the LAPD’s image and crime at the same time. At his retirement he said,

"I think in my almost 40 years as a policeman, my life has counted for something,"

That statement has been under my skin all weekend. I envy Chief Bratton’s confidence that he has done his job and done it well. I know in my head that raising my children “counts” for something, but parenting is a vocation that doesn’t offer predictable results, and in my heart I wonder if I'm doing my job well enough. I can try to do all the “right” things, and my kids may still become criminals, or, worse, lose their faith.  Or they may just not turn out the way I imagine.  And then there's that tricky question of just what all the "right" things are...

I have to remind myself to surrender my expectations, and hope and pray that the kids at least get the basics: love for neighbor and love for God.

And I have to remember not to measure my “success” as a parent to an image of perfect parent from a magazine or a book. For instance, I finished reading Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods this weekend, and while it motivated me to make outdoor play a priority, it also added to my anxiety about being a good parent. How I can find a time and a place for my kids to build a tree house so that they don’t suffer from nature-deficit disorder? When can we buy a farm so that they learn to appreciate creation and their role as stewards of it?  Have I helped them cultivate a sense of wonder or is it too late?

On the tail of reading about the Trapps, who wandered the mountains and countryside near their home, celebrated feasts and sang prayers together, reading this book has thrown me into a state of mild despair that I am failing to give my children a better life. How can I make their lives richer? Is all the moving around that we do robbing them from a sense of connection with a place called home? Will they understand what it means to be a part of a community? Is my discontent a sign that we need to make radical changes?

Or is it rather a sign that I lack gratitude for what we do have? After the kids went to bed Friday night, Dan and I sat outside on the lanai (southern for patio) with our cups of red wine (don’t like to wash stems) talking about our blessedness. We have had so little real suffering in our lives that we wonder if calamity will strike sooner or later. Our culture is so fixated on avoiding pain that an absence of suffering could actually be detrimental to the soul. (Another anxiety: how can our kids acquire virtues if they don’t feel a little pain?)

One minute I think that all my worries will go away if we just make a few major changes – but the next I realize that most of my anxieties could be eased if I made a few minor changes of attitude. Maybe it wasn’t Bill Bratton’s achievements that allowed him to know his life “counted,” but his perspective.

The affliction is easy to diagnose; the cure, harder to effect.

Curatives

Exhausted by a daylong carnival fundraiser at the kids’ school, my husband slept (relatively) late Sunday morning. I drug myself from the nest of our warm bed downstairs to monitor the volume of the kids comparing their candy stashes. They were rapidly moving toward an “it’s no fair” argument. But I threw out the grand prize from the silent auction: a Playmobil airplane. Now all six of them are working together to put it together and to people it with figures from their collection. A rare moment.
Their cooperative play gave me enough time to read this in Magnificat this morning:

To the eye that sees, littleness reveals infinitely more than vastness. God is known more truly by a little finite creature through the contemplation of a snowdrop than through the contemplation of the universe. Very soon the intellect staggers before immensity, it is used up, exhausted, only the rare heart responds to it at all. But the inward eye fills with light when it contemplates a little thing, the heart can fold upon it, and so the heart expands and the mind does not wither, but puts out petal upon lovely petal of thought. . . . If you ever had a little green tree frog and watched him puffing out with a pomposity worthy of a dragon before croaking, you must have guessed that there is a tender smile on our heavenly Father’s face, that he likes us to laugh and he laughs with us; the frog will teach your heart more than all the books of theology in the world.

 From Caryll Houselander, whose little Reed of God is a revelation of beauty in itself.

Perhaps this meditation stuck out because I’ve been reading Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv. I’d seen it on a number of lists, and when the ranger at the Sandhill Crane preserve highly recommended it, I checked it out from the library (I think she meant for me to buy it in the gift shop – instead I bought Scary Stories from the South, which more than one of us will enjoy). Houselander articulates briefly in a paragraph the highest purpose and necessity of nature, which Louv attempts to communicate in a less poetic book with lots of studies and anecdotes, but without ever really spelling out the connection between nature and the eternal.

Not that Louv doesn’t make a lot of good points. Even after reading only a few pages, I felt an urgent need to send the kids outdoors to play. I don’t want them suffering from nature deficit disorder. And they could all use a hit of nature to make them more cheerful and peaceful. We’re a family without a lot of tech gadgets or good TV reception. But sometimes my kids want to stay instead and play Legos or read books more than they want to go outside. Louv pointed out the fact that a/c and central heating deters kids from leaving their controlled climate, an issue here, but since I keep our thermostat at frugal temps, I suspect my kids stay indoors more for other reasons. Perhaps number one is that I can’t let them just bike aimlessly around the neighborhood like I did as a kid. I’m too afraid, both of molesters and of fearful, well meaning, spoilsport neighbors.


Then again, Louv points out that a lot of these fears are unfounded and based on misperceptions of the frequency of random acts of violence.


I suppose I shouldn’t automatically assume a defensive position when I read this book. My oldest are just now hitting the age when they can be a little more independent, and I do let them go fish on the pier and bike to the Air Force Base without me. I make the littles go outside when they’re too noisy. We go to the beach and camping and on hikes. In our old neighborhood, the kids used to play in the swamp and on rocks at Plum Point Park, as I ran around in circles on the road. I don’t really fear that my kids will lack a connection with nature, but I do fear that their opportunities to have free access to green space to play freely will continue to shrink.


When I was little, my parents moved counties to a more rural area, next to a vacant lot. We made a small trail and a stick house in the brambles. We watched may apples die to make room for violets and then for goldenrod. We ice skated on the pond next door (to the neighbor’s consternation). We rode bikes on county roads. And then one day someone bought the lot next door and built a house. And eventually, after I was grown, my parents’ bought 40 acres – a good part of it a big vacant lot.


So we go there when we can to get a dose of nature. I hope my kids have memories of time spent outdoors there and the other places we haul them to. While I may not finish reading Louv’s book because I don’t need to be convinced of the importance of unstructured time spent connecting with God’s creation, I’m thankful for the reminder to encourage to look for little things to contemplate.