Letter to My Parents

Dear Mom and Dad,

I'm reading a nonfiction book by Richard Louv called Last Child in the Woods, and it's the kind of experience that I love from a book: Reading it awakens truths in me that I already knew, somewhere, but hadn't yet articulated.  It's bringing back memories I'd long since forgotten from my childhood; a perfect invocation in this season of wintertime reflection.

The program here at Sanborn, especially the HTOEC School Weeks outdoor education curriculum and philosophy, is very much in line with the concepts in this book.  Reading it affirms what I'm doing with my life (teaching children how to connect with the outdoor world) and helps me to realize how timely and essential this work is.

So much of today's youth spend a majority of their time plugged in, on phones, in front of a TV, sitting at a computer or playing video games.  There's the obesity problem.  Natural spaces are diminishing and a culture of fear often prevents parents from allowing their children to venture outside unsupervised.  Kids are forgetting--or never learning--how to BE in the outdoors.  There are more and more studies showing a direct correlation between less time spent in unstructured outdoor play and an increase in mental, physical, and emotional illness.  This shift away from the natural world is devastating to our society on so many levels.

So, among all this, I write to thank you for allowing nature and unstructured, imaginative play to be a formative part of my childhood.  Maybe you weren't aware, as a parent, of exactly what I was doing as I explored the neighborhood, and perhaps that's part of the beauty of it.  I want to thank you for letting me run loose around Windbury Court to play with friends.  On any given afternoon, we would jump down into neighbors' window wells to collect toads in an old bucket; we'd explore the spooky forest behind the Burkes house to see who was bravest; I'd pick berries (even though you'd told me not to) to taste their bitterness then come home with stained fingertips.  Thank you for watching with me in wonder as pheasants and foxes crossed the church lot behind out house at dusk.  Thanks for trusting that a ring of the cowbell you mounted on the front porch would bring me home for dinner.

When we moved to Orchard Valley, ours was one of the first newly developed lots, and I thank you for re-installing the cowbell on that front porch and again letting me run free.  Thanks, Dad, for not getting too angry when I sneaked your hammer from the tool bench and ran across the vacant lots to the big oak tree next to the Baneks, where the neighbor kids and I constructed a tree fort using the 2x4s and nails we found on construction sites.  Thanks for taking us sledding down the hills of the golf course when it snowed.  Thanks for letting the dogs run without leashes, us behind them.  We moved to Orchard Valley at the perfect time--before the open space of those lots was developed--and we moved away just as houses began to close in.

Thank you for the farm.  Even now, years later, I haven't found the words to encapsulate that time through junior high and high school.  Summer days on the back of my horse in the sunshine, watching fields and fields of cornstalks sway in the wind.  Those memories still soothe me today.

When developers snatched up the endless seas of farmland surrounding our five acres, and when we had to move, too, it was like a piece of me was lost--for a very, very long time.  College, the city, traveling ... I kept searching, but nothing seemed to fill that void.

And now, thank you for Colorado.  Mom and Dad, you are the reason I am here.  I guess I should thank Own Your Own Mountain dot com, too, eh Dad?  Having escaped the city and now rediscovering my Self, I'm happy as I was as a child in the woods.  There's magic in this environment, space for growth and a re-kindling of what I lost when I alienated myself from horses and from nature.

And now I have a job that values this essential connection to nature as much as I do.  I spend my days igniting wonder in kids who normally spend their days plugged in.  The shift that happens out here is profound, and their lives, I truly hope, are changed by it.

Howard Gardner talks about the eight intelligences (and possibly more--see his paper titled A Multiplicity of Intelligences).  One is the Naturalist Intelligence.  Because of you, I think that's me.  You guys instilled in me a deep love of the natural world, and now, since you've exposed me to Colorado, I've found it again.  Thank you.

Love,
Jessie