Winter is dark and the earth is hard. There always seems to be a question, will we be able to make it through the hard times of winter. “Darkness of nature, darkness of event, darkness of the spirit” (Mary Oliver). Many adults suffer from seasonal affective disorder and on a prosaic level it is more of a hassle to help young children get all their winter gear on and get outside. I write these Children in Nature essays to document, explore and reflect on the many adventures in outdoor learning and environmental education I have with the children I work with, firmly convinced of the value of getting outside with my students no matter what. The winter cold revamps the landscape making it a much harder, harsher environment, but the children delight in playing in the darkness, discovering ice in all its forms and assaying the crevices and cracks that bisect the hard earth and the dark sky for warmth, light and life. December is a short work month for me since I go on vacation the 21st which happens to be the Winter Solstice. During the week of the 17th we have a Winter Solstice celebration that culminates with us building a communal fire to celebrate the sun and the life it gives us and the plants and animals with which we share the earth.
Around the yard some of the children discover frozen water in the pots or pans that have been left out from the mud kitchen and they start to “mine” the ice, chipping away with sticks, stones and spoons, delighting in a particularly large chunk of ice or one with a suggestive shape ( “look it is a bird”). We extend the activity by looking for ice in unusual places and of course the first icicles are a reason for a major celebration. We scrounge around for various pots, pans and bowls, fill them with water and then secret them in various places around the yard, doing “experiments.” Then we venture out into the park and the woods encountering different ice forms everywhere we look. Of particular interest are the little, shallow ice “ponds” that develop in the depressions in the park and near the riverside because we can spend a lot of quality time crunching them up underneath our feet and finding some especially beautiful “windowpanes” of ice. I keep a look out for a particularly large swathe of frozen grass and earth that we can return to later in the winter to “skate” on and play games.
And then there is the ice that forms right at the river’s edge in a kaleidoscope of shapes and forms, and the thin sheets we break off with long sticks and watch float down the river. It is a peculiar feature of water that as it gets colder it sinks, and as it gets warmer it rises, a physical phenomena that powers the seasonal turn over of the oxygen and nutrients that revitalize ponds, lakes and the ocean. But while these young children know little of this, they do notice that ice floats which is indicative of another odd physical property of water: once water gets to about 39 degrees Fahrenheit it starts to get lighter. This is what allows for a layer of relatively warmer water underneath the ice where fish can live and breathe during the winter. This is how we “explore, wonder and grow.” We “touch” the world with all of our senses and in turn we are altered by it and learn from it, to the extent that we are open to new experiences and understandings.
We also read books about how day turns to night because the earth rotates around its axis so that different parts of the earth face toward and away from the sun throughout each 24 hour cycle. These rather counterintuitive facts turn out to be child’s play compared to explaining why the seasons happen. Try explaining to a 4 year old the idea old how the earth is tilted on its axis and you are soon lost in a surreal, looking glass world mixture of authority, science, comedy, myth and ideology. Some good books on the subject are On Earth by G. Brian Karas and Reasons for the Seasons by Gail Gibbons. Here is Bill Nye “The Science Guy” with an informative video on the subject.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUU7IyfR34o
Inadvertent animal sightings seem especially prevalent this time of year perhaps because the thick green cover of the summer is gone. Levi excitedly told me he had seen an opossum waddling across his backyard, and we recently saw a skunk slinking alongside the fence of our school. Porcupines are widespread in the Northeast but are often not seen because they are nocturnal and spend a lot of time up in the trees. But you can often see signs of their presence since they like to eat the inner bark or cambium of the trees they hang out in. You can often see fallen branches they have gnawed off from the tops of Hemlock trees or “the bright yellow patches of trees whose bark has recently been chewed by porcupines”( Mary Holland). If you spend some time out in the woods when and where snow has fallen, you will begin to see animal tracks in the snow. Foxes are out and about at this time looking for mates and once they find each other you might be lucky enough to find a pair of fox footprint tracks wending their way through the snow!
It is also a good time to take a closer look at pine cones or the cones of coniferous trees in general. The actual cone that we are familiar with is the female cone that acts like a cradle and shield for the naked, exposed tiny little seeds. The male cone contains the pollen and is much smaller. Pinecones, wreathes, garlands, “christmas trees” and all the evergreen plants that we use to brighten up our homes, towns and cities, have long been worshipped as symbols of resilience, rebirth and regeneration throughout many different cultures where a cold winter season makes it impossible for the deciduous trees to keep their leaves throughout the year.
The winter solstice is a great, multicultural fount of traditions and nature awareness that can become a central, spiritual component of secular schools and institutions and provide necessary, humanist ballast in concert and contrast with the overtly religious and ethnic traditions of Christmas, Hannakuh and Kwanza. A good book I have been using is The Shortest Day of the Year by Wendy Pfeffer. Pfeffer runs through a slew of astronomical achievements and cultural traditions around the changing of the seasons and the celebration of the sun. By this time of the school year I have taught the children how to collect “mouse sticks” to start a fire, we have explored the elements—earth, air, water and fire— through stories, songs and experiences, and we have done all kinds of different activities investigating how plants transform the sun’s energy into sugars, carbohydrates and proteins that animals, and people, can convert into energy for themselves. Celebrating the Winter Solstice together provides a vantage point from which to look back on what we have accomplished and look forward to what we want to explore, investigate and do in the coming months.
We bring together these different experiences in a winter solstice celebration where each class crafts a basket made of natural materials and the class makes a list of things we appreciate about nature and being outside. Then we sing around the fire, talk about the significance of the sun and the fire in our lives, place our nature baskets in the fire and offer up our appreciation and gratitude for the year to the ether. In this way we celebrate the shortest day and the longest night of the year by reaffirming the power of the sun to give us light, warmth, energy and succor!
Mary Oliver writes that “when I came to a teachable age, I was, as most youngsters are, directed toward the acquisition of knowledge, meaning not so much ideas but demonstrated facts.” She describes how “knowledge has entertained me, and it has shaped me and it has failed me.” We are failing our children to the extent that we do not provide them with the opportunities to have deep and sustained experiences with the natural world. As a “mature person” and poet she thinks “there is only one subject worth my attention and that is the precognition of the spiritual side of the world and, within this recognition, the condition of my own spiritual state.” And with this understanding she declares:
“I would therefore write a kind of elemental poetry… I would not talk about the wind, and the oak tree, and the leaf on the oak tree, but on their behalf. I would talk about the owl and the thunderstorm and the daffodil and the red-spotted newt as a company of spirits as well as bodies. I would say that the fox stepping out over the snow has nerves as fine as mine, and a better courage. I would write praise poems that might serve as comforts, reminders, or even cautions if needed to wayward minds and unawakened hearts. I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and chances are one. …The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves—we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny.”
I would call for an “elemental teaching” and caregiving that addresses the bodies, minds and hearts of the whole child. I would not talk down to children as much as talk with them and learn how to listen to them. I would ask that we don’t didactically explain the world to children as much as encounter the world together as a precondition for knowing it. I would offer up my experience as so many reminders and cautions to redirect wayward minds, and share my passions, interests and curiosity so as to wake up together to the world and our co-presence in it.
If there is one lesson that I would teach again and again, one truth infinite in implications and capable of keeping our spirits up and open in dark and difficult times , it is that there are “ a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else.” We are all interconnected in one vast inter-community of interdependent living beings. As Thoreau says in “A Winter’s Walk, “we must go out and re-ally ourselves to Nature every day.”We need to reintegrate and re-ally ourselves with the animals, plants, and energy systems that make up the world. We need to realign our priorities to better fit into the rhythms and processes of nature as part of a coordinated effort to find and create “our way to a sustainable world together.” Let’s go out for a winter walk and wake up to the world and each other.
