Yet Was Wider

When I was three and my family moved from the Chicago area to the wilds of northern Minnesota, I found myself confronted by a wonderful world without limits. I could explore where I wished, experiment as I wanted, and expand my world at will. And expand it did! Those were days of wonder and glory when my eyes were closer to the ground!


MY WORLD AT THREE

Here I stood to watch the squirrels
Scrurrying through the uncut grass,
And there a stump stood, rotting in,
Which I always kicked as I would pass.
The tractor ruts were great ravines
Reverberating wall to wall
With caterpillar calisthenics
And antic ants doing somersaults.

There were no walls within my world

Why Can Children Understand?

"Why can children understand stories so much earlier than logic?" Jerome Bruner, quoted by John Deely .

If We But Knew What We Do

When I was small I lived in the far north country of Minnesota. A twenty minutes walk could bring me to a dozen lakes, or to two houses. Besides that it was all forest, glorious forest that had not been touched in thousands of years. That was my land, my playplace, my sanctuary, my kingdom. I roamed those forests from sun-up to sun-down, getting to know the trees, the shrubs, each lady-slipper and violet that grew in their shade.