Tyler on the Move: Let's Go Outside!

Tyler on the Move
Volume 6
Issue 11
06/18/2008
My love of walking seems a bit fanatical to people at times. It’s just hard to beat being outside, pounding the pavement, dirt, or sand with my feet, words floating round through my head. It’s impossible not to write mentally while I’m surrounded by the natural world. Scenes of books reveal themselves; stories, letters, and emails are easily composed. As the seasons change, leaves unfurl, and bees chase me, I bring olive leaves or moss back inside with me to sit on my keyboard as I type my ideas out. In the shades of green I’ll find the inspiration to keep the writing alive.

Author TA Barron calls nature “real world magic.” Nature connects the finite to the infinite. Although nature is sometimes used in books to merely set the mood, nature is a strong character herself, a presence that breathes directly into the reader. Nature causes us to see beyond ourselves, our smallness, and allows us to dream and grow bigger. Like sailing, books free us from all walls and lead us into the vastness of our planet, or further.

In childhood books are vehicles that take us outside, leading us into forests, gardens, and seashores. Thinking back to those days we remember the stories that took us outside with new vision. Once the books were read, the worlds on the pages entered us and we tiptoed around the garden pretending to be fairies or climbed trees believing them to be masts. I remember a branch high up in a tree that used to be the control for my rocket. When the neighbor boy accidentally broke the branch, I cried so hard I wanted to have a burial for it. I had to find another way to go to outer space.

At the recent Book Expo in L.A., Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, urged authors to include everyday adventures kids can relate to in their books. As opposed to television, where most children are portrayed indoors, books ought to offer that wonderful role modeling, the sense that the reader can set the book down and run outside in search of something hidden in the roses or to make a secret hideout.

The way to inspire our children and the generations to come through nature is by becoming inspired ourselves. When my twin daughters were learning to talk they would tell me that they loved me “beyond”. Just as they had a sense that love was bigger than what they could communicate, we’re touched by the beyond when we stare up at the night sky or watch the sunset in silence. After we’ve been touched, we then touch others without even realizing it. Let’s get off the computer right now and go outside!

Another thought:
After I wrote this week's column for Writer's News Weekly I spent four days at Lake Tahoe with my family. This included my almost eight-year-old twin daughters and nephew, and my six-year-old niece. Spending four days outside with four children was the best way to start summer off right. During a long bike ride along the lake my nephew Harrison said that he felt like he was in the Boxcar Children Bicycle Mystery. I just smiled. As my daughter Tara hummed and hummed to herself while we pedaled through the forest it was sweetest sound I had ever heard.

Though these four children have been blessed to travel to more countries than they can count on both hands, for me it has been beautiful to watch nature draw them in wherever they may be. Whether that has meant searching for millipedes on the tels of Israel or chasing birds in Stockholm, I just love it that running across a stretch of lawn can be more compelling to the foursome than visiting the palaces of St. Petersburg. The single blade of grass is somehow more inspiring and worthy of inspection than all the treasure, gold, and gilt.

Though I certainly have no intention on weaning any of us off of cities - I love hearing my girls' commentaries on architecture and gold does have its rightful allure - I just love it that be it in Regent Park or down the street, geese and caterpillars are always strangely fascinating to the child in us all.