Out in the Field

Dear Families:

Last night at about 8:30PM, the fifth and sixth graders, their teachers and I walked back from the Greenkill Recreation Center to our bunks in silence. We were, however, surrounded by a symphony of sounds – crickets, birds, frogs, and toads – no doubt commenting on the strange procession of flashlight-bearing city dwellers passing through their neighborhood. As New Yorkers, we sometimes like to think of ourselves as sufficiently in control of our environment to deal with life’s many daily challenges, but a trip to the woods directly confronts this sense of perceived authority over our surroundings.

The journey unsettles us and forces upon us a shift in perspective; it leaves us with the realization that we are not such much in control as we may have thought. The wet ground, the smells, the bugs, a rain shower that catches us by surprise conspire to help us to see ourselves in relation to this environment and, by extension, to each other. So as we share a living space and meals and work together to solve a variety of physical challenges, fifth and sixth graders and their teachers discover each other as an interdependent community. This is an awareness that biologist Gary Nabhan comments on In The Geography of Childhood, “It is a crime of deception-convincing people that their own visceral experience of the world hardly matters, and that pre-digested images hold more truth than the simplest time-tried oral tradition. We need to turn to learning about the land by being on the land, or better by being in the thick of it. That is the best way we can stay in touch with the fates of its creatures, its indigenous cultures, [and] its earthbound wisdom. That is the best way we can be in touch with ourselves.”

So while the Greenkill trip represents but a small portion the school year, we hope that the moments shared and lessons learned during these three days continue to resonate and amplify as we move through the year. That our world should become a bit bigger as a result of our direct experience of living in it, that we can also learn to look more deeply at that which is right in front of us, that we need to recognize the impact that an action in one place can have on others in some other place, and that our obligations to each other must extend also to the natural and human-made worlds in which we live – these are a few of the goals of our Greenkill adventure that we hope to build on as we continue our work out in the “field.”

Be well,
Mark