Intimacy with Nature makes for Personal Well-being.––But to enable them to swim with the stream is the least of the benefits this early training should confer on the children; a love of Nature, implanted so early that it will seem to them hereafter to have been born in them, will enrich their lives with pure interests, absorbing pursuits, health, and good humour. "I have seen," says the same writer, "the young man of fierce passions and uncontrollable daring expend healthily that energy which threatened daily to plunge him into recklessness, if not into sin, upon hunting out and collecting, through rock and bog, snow and tempest, every bird and egg of the neighbouring forest . . . I have seen the young London beauty, amid all the excitement and temptation of luxury and flattery, with her heart pure, and her mind occupied in a boudoir full of shells andfossils, flowers and seaweeds, keeping herself unspotted from the world, by considering the lilies of the fields of the field, how they grow."Charlotte Mason is quoting from Charles Kingsley's Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore which seems to be about the advantages of taking Natural History seriously in one's lives. He lists many more benefits to the mind and to physical health, and ends in this manner:
And so I end this little book, hoping, even praying, that it may encourage a few more labourers to go forth into a vineyard, whichthose who have toiled in it know to be full of ever-fresh health, and wonder and simple joy, and the presence and the glory of Him whose name is LOVE.I don't agree with everything Kingsley says but the bit CM quoted rang with me ten years ago when I first read it and it seems to have been borne out in our lives since.
Today's Lesson has a post on Expend Healthily that Energy.
Aidan stacking firewood in front of our house.
No comments:
Post a Comment