When you see this title what you do you think of first? These days it could be a claim for any number of things… a way of eating, a juice cleanse, an essential oil blend, a hand salve ;), the right way to organize your home or closet. But would you think Nature Study?
In her book, Handbook of Nature Study, Anna Botsford Comstock speaks about Nature Study this way. Read what she says…
After all, what is the chief sign of growing old? Is it not the feeling that we know all there is to be known? It is not years which make people old; it is ruts, and a limitation of interests. When we no longer care about anything except our own interests, we are then old, it matters not whether our years be twenty or eighty. It is rejuvenation for the teacher, thus growing old, to stand ignorant as a child in the presence of one of the simplest of nature’s miracles – the formation of a crystal, the evolution of the butterfly from the caterpillar, the exquisite adjustment of the silken lines in the spider’s orb web. I know how to “make magic” for the teacher who is growing old. Let her go out with her youngest pupil and reverently watch with him the miracle of the blossoming violet and say: “Dear Nature, I know naught of the wondrous life of these, your smallest creature. Teach me!” and she will suddenly find herself young.
page 4, Handbook of Nature Study
This Spring I have realized one thing that I never understood about flowering trees: it is always better to walk under them than to drive past them. The view will always be better, you will be able to smell the fragrance of the blossoms, you will be able to see and even feel the petals falling from the flowers, and you will never miss the miracle of God’s creation. When you drive past them- it’s all to fast to take in, your senses aren’t awakened to their fullest extent. When we drive past everything in this life, we get in the ruts that Comstock writes about, no matter how old we are. Those ruts make look different for each one of us, but they are all similar in the way that keep us stagnant.
Check out our homeschool curriculum here: A Gentle Feast.
Drink in the Elixir of Youth today- go out, and experience some of Spring. <3 Kate
