Here in the darkness of winter in the Finger Lakes, I like to think of the bright days of summer. There’s an annual summer event at my house which is not memorialized on any calendar, although it means more to me than quite a few of the federal holidays. I wasn’t the one that discovered this event; it was my son Henry, who is watching me in the photo above.
Henry is three years old, fascinated with all things that roll or float, and quite a resourceful little guy. I imagine his resourcefulness is a product of having two older and more vocal sisters. Henry is also one of the finest observers I have ever met.
Our garage is behind the house and a short sidewalk connects the two. At about the same time every summer and only once each summer as far as I have noticed, tiny ants cross from one side of our sidewalk to the other; really tiny, about an eighth of an inch long. This is a journey of about four feet (a few miles in ant-distance?). They take every thing they own, which is to say themselves and their young, and they go from the left side to the right side of the sidewalk. There are thousands of them, so many and so small that in passing they look like a dark stain on the sidewalk. I have never seen them cross from right to left, nor do I know if they are really the same ants year to year. I also do not know why they do it; I guess I’ll just chalk it up to their believing, as many of us do, that the grass is greener on the other side!
This takes all day. The sidewalk is made of concrete bricks, I imagine not easy for something so small to navigate. Henry will stand-sit, as only little kids can, with the flats of his feet and his butt on the ground at the same time, watching them. Henry, being three, does not stay in any one place for long, but throughout the day he remembers what the ants are up to and comes back to check on their progress. No trace remains of the ants’ journey when I walk the sidewalk to the garage the next morning.
My wife, Hilarie and I would never have noticed this event without Henry. Henry is teaching me something with many dimensions of importance in my relationship to my surroundings, but only if I am willing to take a breath, linger, and see as he does. This last part is so difficult! When Hilarie or I walk the sidewalk, our minds are usually fixed on the larger goals of that small journey. Physically this is either the house or the garage; making dinner, or the next trip to work or on errands. Mentally we have already jumped ahead to the plan for the next hour, day, week, with a mental check of travel times, potential obstacles, and expected outcomes.
By way of this story, I am proposing that the first step in forming a meaningful relationship with the things that surround us, be they people or not-people, is to personally know them. Henry is learning his world moment by moment, encounter by encounter, in the present tense. And he is learning it at a very fine, small scale, through the things he can experience with his own senses. Thus, every relationship he makes is genuine and true to him; no one told him the ants were an unimportant detail in life, and no one is telling him to believe a certain way other than the opinion he forms through his own experiences. The subjects in our environments, people or not-people, are not commodities, not extensions of ourselves; not chess pieces we forecast the movement of to win the game. They are subjects with which we form relationships.
My work life, separate from my experiences at home, is in stark contrast to what Henry is teaching me. And I worry that the modern, large-scale world, when it does intrude into Henry’s subjective view, will teach him to forget some very important things he is learning. Personal knowing substituted with the experiences of others, places turned into destinations and backdoor sidewalks turned into landscapes flying past a car window. Days spent in clockwork and on planning for the future. Ant watching? Let me check my calendar.
These things that our work-lives are teaching us change our view of our surroundings radically. I find it hard to snap out of it. It reminds me of a passage in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan, where he describes the way one’s vision changes when foraging for wild mushrooms. One moment the mushrooms are not there, and the next moment the mushrooms reveal themselves. It’s not that the mushrooms suddenly appeared; it’s the view of the observer that changed.
I will help my son to stay true to his own experience when the modern world comes crashing in because this view, Henry’s view, resonates with a cliché I hold dear. A stubborn independence to meet the world in your own way, according to your own experience, is a rural value sometimes seen as stemming from ignorance. It has, in my opinion, nothing to do with ignorance. I think it’s actually a product of a fine scale of view, and a favoring of what you yourself experience over what you are told is the proper reaction to the issue at hand. I see this in my opinion of much of modern architecture, which has little to do with the most meaningful parts of my own personal experience, and which I am told – through some fairly torturous explanations – is the most genuine view of architecture in this age. As you can guess, this opinion gets me into trouble sometimes.
This knowing, through your own eyes and at ant-scale is also something I bring into my work as an architect. Its connection wasn’t obvious to me until an insightful participant at a visioning workshop for a nature center project characterized a “wandering” experience of nature that he had seen in his own children, and asked how we could encourage that experience in our project. Typically classes visiting nature centers follow structured tours, “stop here, look at that, move to the next display, then back on the bus.” Sort of like nature as a set of museum exhibits in different rooms. Very much unlike Henry’s experience, and not a way I think children should learn about the natural world. (As a side note, Henry would be the one that jumped the walkway railing and went off to look at a rock or a bug somewhere!)
We are developing a non-linear and present-moment experience of nature in this project. I am confident it will also promote a small-scale, personal view of nature, because that’s the way kids meet their environment if given a choice. One idea is to just let the kids go, experience an outside area on their own terms, and then have them bring what they saw/learned back to the group to share their stories and to allow the center’s staff to help them link their experiences together into larger views of their environment. I like this idea. As a designer, it means I am designing an experience not along any preset sequence (ex: sidewalk to front door to vestibule to corridor to elevator, etc.), but rather have the job of encouraging people to get up-close and personal with nature on their own terms. At the nature center this is easy: give them a safe area in which to roam and make sure that area includes the unique features of the site’s ecology. But in and around any building I can do this as well, connecting people with nature’s many present-moment experiences by letting the architecture and the site design “stand back,” so we can watch the ants.
I can’t wait to show my son what I have learned from him.
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