This weekend was one of summer perfection. We camped Friday night. Hiked Saturday. Watched West rip on the Strider on our local mountain bike trails on Sunday.
Uninterrupted hours of outdoor mountain time…
Watching West at our campsite on Friday I felt an immense joy that we can raise our kid outdoors.
This quote from The History of Love has been in the forefront of my mind recently, “They collected the world in small handfuls, and when the sky grew dark, they parted with leaves in their hair.”
I have been thinking about it because I can see our kid collect the world in small handfuls and begin to piece it together in the most whimsical of ways because of all the time we spend in the mountains, in the desert, by a river, and traveling to find epic corners of the world to find more wild landscapes.
His world starts from the ground up. It starts with the lizards, the rocks, the caterpillars, the aspen trees. His perspective of how life works begins there. He once told me that the clouds came down to the ground and made the snow.
And he was right. The science, the philosophy, the stories, they all begin with the autonomy he has to wander through outdoor places. I can see him think critically about how things fit together, because he has watched nature flow and seen different perspectives from the road.
We started this blog because we ourselves sought something like it. Ideas for how to get outside with a little kid in tow. It can be easy to get caught up in the things that “sell” on a blog like this. Lists of gear. Tips for camping, hiking etc. I find value in these things myself, but the intangibles of this whole journey, the thing no list could ever capture, is the independent, thoughtful, and curious kid I see evolving before my eyes when I let nature and exploration of new places do the work.
This shouldn’t surprise me I suppose. West reminds me of how much I still have to learn from putting one foot in front of the other on rock or watching a river meander. I think most of the important lessons begin there. And I am glad as a parent I can defer to the wilderness to help West piece together the world.
