Why I choose a swamp

"Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps." from Thoreau's Walking

I like things to be neat and ordered. I like to know where I am going, what will happen next, and I like to have each turn planned, written down (in case I forget), and successfully crossed off my list when executed. This pattern of ordered behavior makes me think I am living, but I am not truly living. If only I could detached from outcomes and delight in the mess of the process of life, then, ah, then, I would be free and wild and natural.

These two opposing forces in me--the cultivated and civilized self vs. the free and wild and natural self--are constantly played out each day as a parent. These forces each want to have some say in how I relate to my children, how I create a space for them to learn, how I encourage, how I love, and in how I think about their futures. My journey of home education and parenthood set the stage for these opposing forces to fight it out. Not sure this is a blessing or a curse, but it is the gift these journeys have given me. At least, it is a gift of awareness.

I don't think my children know about the battle that rages on inside of me, although twenty years from now in their mature ages, they might notice it in themselves. I waver between setting the pace for them and letting them set their own pace. I waver between panicking that they might not know certain historical information, math facts, how to write a paragraph, and all the other things that children their age should know vs. knowing that at my ripe age, learning is a life long process. Facts can be learned, skills developed all in time. This is a battle between institution/tradition/civilization and Nature and it is played out in my home, and dare I say, it is played out in yours too.

Being one who desires Nature as her guide means that I choose a swamp, a messy, smelly, impervious, quaking, mucky ground to home myself, even though I live like I want the ordered, planned life. But like Thoreau in his essay on Walking, "you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhoods of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp." Why?

1. I already live in the swamp. So the swamp is just the proper name to claim for my home and what happens around here both in parenting but more so within my internal self. My emotions, my thoughts, some impervious, some quaking here and there, often, and with passion, remind me that I am already in the swamp, I just want to now embrace it. I am already wild and free and natural, I just need to claim it. Gardens are beautiful, and I dream of walking in a cultivated garden like Monet's Giverny, but the real me finds freedom in the swamp. The real me touches the universe in the muck and mud and water and thick sloop it creates. Parenting is a swamp!

2. The swamp has its own order. The muck, its own give and take. The swamp, although appearing dismal, is open and free to the gifts of Nature. Its interconnectedness with its surroundings, its reliance on the elements for life, orders its ecosystem. It is both wild and free. No cultivation from the outside, changes come from within, order comes from its true essence and role in the system. It is not proscribed, not imposed from the outside, it just becomes what it is to become. I would like this for all swamps, all homes, all children, all people. It is the ultimate gift from Nature.

3. The swamp is about wild. Thoreau claims, "in Literature, it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet and The Iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned in schools, that delights us." We are attracted to the wild in life, in literature, in art, in Nature, but how do we see the wild in ourselves? Do we embrace it? Do we try to control it? Suppress it? Do we practice wildness?

Like Thoreau, in our walking, we ground ourselves. In our daily acts, in our spiritual practices, we choose where we will find our grounding. Will it be in the cultivated gardens or in the swamps?