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My Neighbors’ Playground

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My neighbors have the world’s greatest playground.

These neighbors are Ally, Nadeema, Indy, Abbie, and KK. Their ages are six, five, four, three, and two, respectively, and last week they took me on a tour of their playground. This playground is not a traditional one…or perhaps it’s the most traditional one. It has no slides or swing sets or monkey bars. It doesn’t have a see-saw, a sandbox, or a jungle gym. But it has trees. It has plants. It has mud and dirt and golden apples and the most fascinating sticks. It has rocks and insects and leaves that feel like velvet and leaves that stick to your fingers. It has innumerable textures and noises and smells and shades of green.

You can only swing on the monkey bars, or slide down a slide so many times before getting bored or dizzy. After sitting in a sandbox for a while, you start to feel cramped and confined. But in my neighbors’ playground, located in a leafy green corner of eastern Dominica, your fascination never wanes.

Last Friday afternoon, my neighbors’ parents were studying the course “Reflections on the Life of the Spirit,” the first book in a sequence studied by Bahá’ís and others around the world, with the dual purpose of learning about the Bahá’í writings and building capacity for service in the community. I’d planned on having an informal children’s class with the five kids during that time, and arrived at their home with my ukulele and a box of crayons.

But the children had no intention of sitting down to color. Instead, they took my hand and led me through their playground. I realized, as we took the first steps into the natural wonderland that is their backyard, that today they would be the teachers, and I would be the student. I was reminded again of a quote, by a very wise person called Zeno, which I’d been meditating on this week:
 

“We have two ears, but only one mouth in order that we may listen more and talk less.”
 

I decided I ought to try this, as I followed my neighbors along the jungle pathways of their playground—to listen to these children, and to let them lead me. I believe that if we listen more and talk less, children can be our best teachers…children, and nature.

Our first destination was a special pile of sticks. It was clearly a sacred place for the children, and we paused there a good long while, admiring the sticks, running our hands over the contours of the smooth, curvy ones…standing on the larger, wobbly ones and trying to keep our balance…etching pictures in the soft earth with the thin, pointy ones…hitting the clackety ones together for some glorious percussion. Indio—shirtless, with a golden-brown braid down his back—showed us how he could lift a stick twice his size and hold it high above his head.

As we continued through the playground, my neighbors pointed out an important tree, the leaves of which can be burned to keep mosquitoes away. Nadeema—fiery eyed and determined—broke off a branch and instructed that I take it home and burn the leaves in a large tin can before going to sleep. Beyond the mosquito-leaf tree was a muddy slope, slippery from last night’s rainfall. Nadeema took KK (age three, but nearly the size of her five-year-old cousin) from my arms, and held her on her back. “You will fall if you carry her,” she explained to me.

Silky-haired Abbie did fall, right on her belly, covering herself with mud and leaves. I was about to react, when I realized that she wasn’t reacting. Instead, she pulled herself off, scraped the mud off her tummy with a wide banana leaf, and resumed her trek.

At the bottom of the slippery hill was the grove of mango trees, under which their dog Whitey took an afternoon nap and never woke up. We stood there in reverence, remembering Whitey, and how much she loved to eat rice. We all agreed that she’d picked a lovely resting place. Past the mango grove were the golden apple trees and pepper plants. The children picked armfuls of golden apples—still not quite ripe—and gnawed contentedly. Abbie asked me to please bite open three of them for her, as the hard rind hurt her teeth. KK, uninterested in the golden apples, toddled over to the pepper plants—brilliant red ornaments nestled amid turquoise leaves—and picked a small handful of them for me. “You’ll put those in your soup,” the older children instructed.

When we reached a patch of earth strewn with brightly colored flowers, my neighbors decided we ought to stop and sing. So we sang songs about gardens and moonlight and God, sitting there amid the yellow and orange flowers, ’til the sky and sea turned a dusty purple, and the children’s mothers began calling them in for their evening tea.

Ally took the lead, followed by Abbie, Indy, Nadeema, and KK, who held my hand. Twilight softened our path as we retraced our steps through the pepper patch, past the golden apple trees, and the grove where Whitey died, up the slippery-slidy slope, around the mosquito-leaf tree, and through the special pile of sticks. My neighbors were mud-kissed, bare-footed, and radiant…and as I watched their tiny forms navigate through the darkening jungle, I called to mind a book I’d read in graduate school, Richard Louv’s The Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. In this very important book, Louv argues that interacting with the natural world is as vital a human need as sleeping and eating. And that many of today’s children diagnosed with ADD are simply suffering from nature deprivation. Louv affirms:

A growing body of research links our mental, physical, and spiritual health directly to association with nature…Nature inspires creativity in a child by demanding visualization and the full use of the senses. Given a chance, a child will bring confusion of the world to the woods, wash it in the creek, and turn it over to see what lives on the unseen side of that confusion.

I am grateful that my beloved friends and teachers—Ally, Nadeema, Abbie, Indy, and KK—will never (at least not in their childhood) have to suffer from nature deficit disorder…for theirs is the bounty of growing up with the world’s greatest playground, right in their backyard.


Denali Miedema and her husband Luke recently moved to the island of St. Thomas for the purpose of supporting the local Bahá’í activities, particularly the programs for youth and pre-adolescents. Denali has worked as a teacher of Language Arts and Bilingual Special Education, and is currently teaching middle school Spanish.
 

Updated on 10.24.13