Theo's Nature Memories

I was wandering around on the web and came across the idea of making a nature journal with children. You can find what I read about nature journals on this website. I realized that I wanted to start a nature journal with my grandson, who is now 22 months. The last time I saw Theo, I took him outside. After playing with his trucks and in his sand box, I wanted to do something to connect to nature with him. He didn't want to go far from the house, so finally I had the idea to look up. It was a partly cloudy day, and the sky displayed a mosaic of small white puffy clouds. I pointed the clouds out to Theo. I pretended to try to grab them and catch them and bring them down to him. He thought it was terribly funny and leaned back and laughed, a big belly laugh. This of course egged me on. I pretended the clouds were cookies and tried to grab them again and again and give them to him. Each time I did it, he laughed that big joyous belly laugh. I lifted him up so he could try to reach the clouds, and he thought that was just as funny.


Now, ready to make a nature journal for Theo, I decided to start with our experience with the clouds. I hadn't taken pictures that day, so on another day with white puffy clouds, I took several pictures, and chose one for the cover of the journal. Theo came over last week and I showed him the journal. He didn't seem to remember our cloud experience, but he did seem to like the notebook, at least for a moment or two. 


I took Theo outside again. I had to carry him because he has broken his leg and has a cast all the way up to the middle of his thigh. He is heavy! I carried him along the pathway through my garden. When we came to the first tree, we stopped. I said, "Hello, Tree," and Theo said, "Hello, Tree." We spent some time looking at the tree and speaking to it. Then we continued along the pathway and back to the  lawn. Theo wanted to go around again before returning inside. This time when we reached the tree I said, "Good-bye, Tree." Theo said, "Bye-bye, Tree." The first page for Theo's Nature Journal will have this picture of the tree we visited and the words "Hello, Tree" above the picture and "Good-Bye Tree," under it.

I contemplate a tree. 

I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground. 

I can feel it as movement: the flowing veins around the sturdy, striving core, the sucking of the roots, the breathing of the leaves, the infinite commerce with earth and air--and the growing itself in its darkness. 

I can assign it to a species and observe it as an instance, with an eye to its construction and its way of life. 

I can overcome its uniqueness and form so rigorously that I recognize it only as an expression of the law--those laws according to which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or those laws according to which the elements mix and separate. 

I can dissolve it into a number, into a pure relation between numbers, and eternalize it. 

Throughout all of this the tree remains my object and has its place and its time span, its kind and condition. 

But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It.…What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself.                     

                                                                                                 --Martin Buber, I and Thou