Have you taken a walk outside lately? Stopped to smell the jasmine, or watched the sun crystallise through raindrop-laden trees? To me, there’s as much beauty in the spectacular sunset as there is in the shimmering dragonfly wing, and have even more joy in them now that I’ve found a companion to share my awe.
From the day my son, now 9, could hold his head up and look around, he was strapped into his baby carrier and taken to the park, where he could look up at the tree canopy overhead, look at leaves change colour, and learn to recognize which bird is what. It took having a fearless child, to help me overcome my squeamishness about bugs, so now I have no difficulty picking up a millipede, or turning over a log to see what critter sits beneath.
He’s been camping with me, go rock-climbing, clambered up trees and down hills, canoed, just a small percentage of all the things I’d like him to do in the great outdoors.
Until the lockdown put paid to our outdoor life last year, almost every weekend was spent doing at least a little something outside. We had just come back from a fantastic tiger-sighting trip at Nagarahole when the virus hit. Luckily, our terrace garden became our haven and sanity, where we spent hours just lying on our backs and cloud-gazing, observing the resident praying mantis from up close, or just making sure the aphids didn’t decimate our tomato plants!
Some of my fondest memories with him this past summer are of long walks on the beaches of Goa, wading in secret rock pools, and finding new and incredible life forms every day. We went walking in fields, and on the back roads, picking up interesting things and trying to identify them. Sitting in the balcony of our little vacation rental, we spotted at least a dozen species of uncommon birds, excited to see the little differences between them with our handy binocs.
With the siren call of his computers and video games growing louder by the minute, I feel an even more urgent
race against time to ensure that he raises his head from a screen long enough to recognize the whole wide world outside; To correlate his electrical circuits with the networks of tree roots, the unfurling fern shoot with Fibonacci’s ratio, the crashing of the silvery tides with Newton’s apple.
I feel I owe it to him, if there’s nothing else I ever do for him as a parent, it’s to show him how to appreciate and find joys in Nature, big or small, and what better way to do that, than start by taking a walk and looking!
As my favourite poet Mary Oliver says in How I go the Woods,
“If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much”.
Pencil and paper
Once there was a pencil and a paper, their friend was an eraser, they lived with a baker.
They wanted to get out of the house, but they had to live with the cows
They were so tired of staying, they wanted to go out and start playing.
They kept trying to go but they were always too slow.
The baker was going to throw them away, they were about to go to Bombay.
They ran away from home,
They went to live in Rome.
They were so happy like a soft washed nappy.
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