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The Value of Nature, the Inner Child, and Holes
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my inner child, one who I have been calling my Inner Wild Child. I agree with those Romantic writers and thinkers who hold, as one of their basic tenets, that youth are relatively innocent and have a special connection with and attraction to Nature; they are the closest humans come to being unaffected by ego concerns of others’ expectations and demands.
My Inner Wild Child loves Nature. I delight to walk barefoot in the grass or over soft enough terrain that won’t physically hurt my tender feet. In my imagination, I thrill to find a grassy hill, throw myself down, and roll side over side, hoping the hill is long enough that I am dizzy when I stand up. Then, regaining a bit of balance, I run up and do it again, over and over, pure, unmitigated joy.
Often adults who would see children doing such things would intervene or dismiss them as silly. Silly, now there’s a fine word in its origin. Adult thinkers have corrupted the meaning to foolishness, but the Old English sense held the idea of being happy and prosperous on to the early Middle English period where it expanded to the idea of innocence.
Innocence is another fine, wondrous word to me and to many Romantic thinkers. Innocence implies that sense of no artifice, another thought I’ve been entertaining, artifice aforethought.
