A Place Of Wildness And Wonder

By now, most of us know that one of the most powerful stress and anxiety reducers is to spend time outside in nature. This is part of the reason that forest schools and other kinds of outdoor education are increasing in popularity, especially as we are experiencing a crisis in terms of the mental health of our youth.

My friend Erin Kenny, forest school pioneer, author, and creator of The Cedarsong Way, would say, "The kids can't bounce off the wall if you take away the walls," a mantra that I expect holds true for all of us. As a teacher in an urban school wanting to expose the children in my care to the benefits of nature, I once asked her if being outside was enough. She answered that it depended on what kind of outside I was talking about. She conceded that being outdoors was probably better than indoors, but that most urban areas were too "constructed" and "controlled" for children to receive the full benefits. "There is a wildness to nature," she said, "that is hard to find in a city."

There are gardens and parks, of course, but those kinds of places, while beautiful and made from natural things, are also managed spaces. Humans restrict, prune, clear, and plant. We decide what will thrive and what will not. We make rules and draw boundaries. In other words, we make these places less than wild.

One of the reasons that taking children outdoors, even if it isn't into a natural space, is so beneficial is that we adults tend to care less about outdoor spaces. Inside we fuss over the little virtues of cleanliness, tidiness, the proper uses of things ("Chairs are not for standing!"). Outdoors we back off a bit and that alone might explain why most children are more relaxed, open-minded, and creative outside. Even so, most playgrounds are managed spaces as well and to the degree they are is the degree to which we reduce the potential benefits to children and to ourselves.

But urban settings aren't without their wildness and thus their ability to be natural spaces. They exist all around us, but they tend to be places we overlook or even actively avoid. I'm thinking of vacant lots, the scruffy no-man's land between buildings, abandoned buildings, alleyways, and other "wastelands." They are not places of picturesque beauty, nor are they likely to inspire awe or a sense of oneness with the universe, but children who grew up in less suspicious times knew these as desirable places to play largely due to the fact that there were no adults around to manage the wildness out of them. Plants emerged from cracks, critters scurried about, and if you broke something, who cared?

Yes, I'm aware that hazards abound in such places, but isn't that in the nature of wildness? Isn't that, in part, exactly why being in nature is so profoundly beneficial? It isn't only about breathing meditatively or hiking serenely in a beautiful places. As Erin suggested, we also need the infinite possibilities of wildness in our lives and part of what makes a place wild is giving up on our urge to manage, control, and maintain, leaving to it just be as a place of wildness and wonder.

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