Like The Wild Was Waiting For Us

Hadley, Harper, and I are on our way to hike around Seneca Creek State Park when Harper says, “Mommy, did you know Abraham Lincoln was a wrestler?” I’m wondering whether Harper is speaking figuratively, but I tell her that no, I did not know President Lincoln was a wrestler.

“Yup, he was,” she tells me. “I have a picture of him and he’s holding a man above his head and he has his top hat on so you know it’s him. You know it’s Abraham Lincoln.”

“Because of the top hat,” I confirm.

“Exactly.”

It’s Day Two of Spring Break and I’m thoroughly baffled. Where is this picture? Is it in a book? An encyclopedia? Did Harper find this picture on Google? When was she on Google?

My next thought is, “Well, at least I’m not in the middle of a conversation about butts and poop.” Hadley and Harper cannot go an hour without talking about butts and/or poop. Last night, as I was walking upstairs to read to the girls before bed, I heard Harper say to Hadley, “If you don’t tell on me, I’ll NEVER say that word again.” I braced myself for the worst. Turns out, Harper said butt magic. Like, Big Magic except not.

“Stop saying stuff with butt in it,” I tell the girls.

“OK! HAHAHAHAHAHA! NO MORE BUTTS! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA,” is how they respond. It’s a lost cause. What’s a mom to do? You want some advice? You just keep on keepin’ on. You can’t stop the butts. They are unstoppable, and they are everywhere. May as well hike around nature for a bit.

So that’s what we do, and I’d like to tell you the jokes stop for a while, but then you would pack a backpack and snacks, throw your kids in the car and jubilantly drive to the land where nobody makes butt jokes and everyone contemplates the beauty of God’s creation. My friends, unless you’re referring to the function and/or look of derrières, don’t hold your breath. As we got out of the car, Harper coughed with her mouth closed and that made her toot, which made her laugh so hard I didn’t think we would ever hit the trail.

“Hadley! Hadley! I coughed with my mouth closed and guess what happened? I TOOTED! HAHAHAHAHAHA!  Come here! Come here! Listen to me cough with my mouth closed. Maybe it’ll happen again!”

A few minutes into the woods, though, and there’s more to talk about. Hadley tries to walk on all the fallen tree trunks. She wants to see how close to the water she can get while staying on the trunks. She notices that the higher off the ground the trunk is, the more bouncy it becomes and she gets nervous. “If I stay on some of these,” she says “I’ll fall.”

“You’ll have to learn how to fall on a slant,” I tell her, and we are both silent for a few minutes. I am thinking about what it means to fall on a slant; to slip off a log and land on uneven ground. Would Hadley be afraid? Would she be upset because she got hurt? Would she be exhilarated because she knew there was a possibility she could fall, and she did, but she’s OK and now she can say she knows how it feels to live for a moment on an uneven, unstable surface?

Harper sings and skips and picks up treasure along the way. She examines tree bark, acorns, and looks for bright green buds popping out of the dirt. She tells us she loves the plunk and pop of the water that laps on the edges of where we are, and  when the wind blows through the trees above us she is startled. “What is that?”

“That’s the wind,” I tell her.

“Oh,” she sighs. “I wish you could take a picture of this sound, Mommy.”

 

 

Half-way through our hike, Harper begins to look for H’s. She finds them everywhere.

 

“There are so many H’s out today!” she exclaims, “it’s like the wild was waiting for us.”

I am reading an advanced copy of Paula Huston’s new book, One Ordinary Sunday: A Meditation on the Mystery of Mass (I am reviewing it for The Englewood Review.) In a section called “Mass at Play,” she writes about playing in preparation for the more serious, more sacred story of Mass. “The soul must learn to abandon, at least in prayer, the restlessness of purposeful activity;” Huston tells us that Romano Guardini says. “It must learn to waste time for the sake of God, and to be prepared for the sacred game with saying and thought and gestures, without always asking, ‘Why?’ and ‘Wherefore?'”

Huston shares Pope Benedict XVI’s thoughts on play: “Children’s play seems in many ways a kind of anticipation of life, a rehearsal for later life, without its burdens and gravity. On this analogy, the liturgy would be a reminder that we are all children, or should be children, in relation to that true life toward which we yearn to go.”

We are outside, the three of us; not in Mass. I wonder though, what might be sacred about what we are doing? What is divine about the wild waiting for us? What sort of testimony are we living when we find a piece of ourselves in the wild and declare that, of course we have found ourselves here – the wild’s been waiting for us!

We are at the end of our hike, Hadley is yards in front, playing some sort of game with herself: she cannot step on mud, only tree trunks. Harper is yards behind me, her pockets bulging with treasure, her head low to the ground looking for more H’s. I stop to watch her. She hears me stop and looks up, I think, to gauge whether my stance shows that I am annoyed that she’s taking too long. I’m not annoyed; just watching my girl explore.

“I’m not lollygagging,” Harper says, “I just don’t want to miss any treasure.”

“Where in the world did you learn the word, ‘lollygag,’ Harper?” I ask. I’m amazed, and trying to think back to which book she is reading that she picked that word up. Magic Treehouse? Harry Potter?

“Potty Animals,” Harper says.

Clearly the wild waits for my girls in the most unexpected places; ready to make them laugh, ready to show them how to fall on a slant, ready to play so they can do and become whatever it is they are yearning towards.