Sunday, October 9, 2011

Walk with children

Today we went with the children to Pirttimäki forests, walking the wide (and some narrower) paths for two hours. It is starting to be late autumn, and many trees are quite bare already.

It has been raining a lot, and thus there is a lot of water in ditches, rivulets and swamps. The children played with breaking up the twig-and-leaf dams which had clogged the water flow.

It is remarkable how much to discover there are even in a single ditch, not to speak of larger domains. When do adults start losing this skill of immersion in the world of now?

I have been reading the novel "Childhood" by Bo Carpelan (in Finnish, Lapsuus, 2008). Carpelan has the enviable skill of showing the direct experience of children in his writing. In this book Carpelan writes so well that it sometimes hurts to read the text - the light is so bright it hurts. (You can say the same of Dostoyevsky but for a different reason, with him it is the darkness that hurts.)

Anyway, walking with children was like time wouldn't exist - two hours disappeared in a few eternal moments.

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