Who Wouldn't Want to Be Part of That?

Growing up, all things being equal, when given the choice, we would opt for being outside over inside. For many years as an educator I informally polled the children in my care, asking where they would prefer to be. Very rarely did anyone choose to be inside when outside was an option. I would likewise ask if they would rather play video games or play with their friends. Most chose friends, although one boy, after giving it some thought, replied, "I'd rather play video games outside with my friends." He rejected the binary choice, yet still, even with video games involved, he wanted to closer to nature.

We tend to forget that nature is not a finished product, but rather a process that is ongoing. As mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it, "Nature is never complete. It is always passing beyond itself. This is the creative advance of nature." 

Studies consistently show that most humans, most of the time, are more cognitively alive while free from the confines of ceilings and walls. We think more clearly, more creatively, and it's probably not an accident that we also tend to feel less anxious when our horizons are expansive. Perhaps that's because we too are a part of the creative advance of nature. 

Our scientific tradition often place humans, and particularly our conscious minds, outside of nature. They tell us that things we can't see, like atoms and electromagnetic fields, are real, whereas things we actually experience, like colors and the passage of time, are just fabrications of our minds. Whitehead and others refer to this as the bifurcation of nature. But as any child knows, we are not separate from nature, but rather fully intertwined with it: we are nature as much as any leaf or bird or geological process. 

In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, "(S)cience is rigorous in separating the observer from the observed, and the observed from the observer." But "We make a grave error, if we try to separate individual well-being from the health of the whole." 

When I'm amidst young children at play, especially outdoors, it's impossible to not see that they are doing nothing less than fully engaging with Mother Nature's process, filling their role, not as individual agents, but rather as integrated aspects of the full of expression of nature's creative process. It's not a great leap to see this creative process as all of nature playing. And who wouldn't want to be part of that?

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