Dryad of the playground

We don't usually hang out at the park like so many other caretaker/kid combos in my four year old's age bracket, as we have quite an adequate yard and do plenty of adventuring as a family, but a quirk in our routine gave us half an hour to kill downtown so rather than driving home, we went to the park.  It is a really nice park, considering that we have no trees in this part of the world save at this particular park.  There are several huge cottonwoods giving enough shade to mimic a forest while some elderly but charismatic cedars, twisted into peculiar shapes, are frozen in mid-dance upon a carpet of thick green grass (another oddity), seemingly ignorant of the requisite 'safe' playground equipment standing in precise military formation not a stone's throw away.  Whilst the child sported on the ergonomically approved paraphernalia, I held tryst with the trees.  It was wet and cool and sunny and might almost have been a morning of early spring rather than the very end of summer, such was the fineness of the morning.  I crept about, barefoot of course, on the wet grass and watched the dancing sunlight and shadows, remembering my own childhood, for these indeed were the very companions of my youth: sunlight and shadows, dew and mist, and the cool of the morning.

It was a quite a contrast to the brightly colored but highly ordered, governmentally approved play area; the former is most certainly poetry whereas the playground equipment is not only prose, but the prosiest prose, perhaps an instruction manual for assembling something large, bulky, and consisting of innumerable small parts.  Then I marveled at and pitied the children whose sole knowledge of the natural world must indeed be just such brightly colored behemoths, garish and sweltering in the full sun, knowing nothing of the wind in the leaves, the whimsical play of light and shadow and wind, the rich smell of damp earth and growing things, who have never had the chance to wonder at the deepest mysteries of this peculiar and achingly beautiful thing we call life.

Playgrounds are not bad, neither are safety precautions, but when taken too far, when childhood is reduced, as it so commonly is in our modern world, to a list of can'ts and don'ts, an ever broadening expanse of rules and regulations, warnings and cautions, no wonder our children think the world flat and dull, preferring to escape into some virtual reality where they can be or do anything, explore and learn, without a glaring yellow caution sign taking all the joy and spontaneity and wonder out of the moment.  I should have understood what I was getting into from the first, from the warnings printed all over the infant carseat, destroying the cute pattern of blue and grey forest animals with garish yellow and orange patches informing me that my child would probably die if I used the car seat and would certainly die if I didn't.  That is what modern sensibilities have done to our whole world.

We can't have a book without a trigger warning.  We can't have a speaker on campus who might say something offensive to somebody, therefore they daren't say anything at all, which makes the whole speech pointless.  We can't even say that the child adding two and two and getting three is wrong, because it might hurt his burgeoning self esteem, rather we pat him on the back for effort and send him smilingly on his way to graduation where he still can't add two and two, but he sure thinks he can and that is almost the same thing, probably better!  Does anybody else ever think they are living in a parody movie, that they are going to wake up and discover that it was all a silly dream at any moment?

To be ruled by feelings, by the fear of everything, is not living, nay it is hardly existing.  The world is dangerous and messy, it isn't easy or simple, it cannot be controlled, as much as we like to pretend that it can, but it is also mysterious and wonderful and splendid and breathtaking, at least if we can forget to take selfies for a few moments to actually gaze upon it.  To paraphrase a certain Beaver, 'it isn't safe, but it is good,' it was once pronounced to be 'very good,' and though we've managed to mess it up dreadfully since those words were spoken, it still remains a source of awe and inspiration to this day, if only we have eyes to see it and nerve to risk it.  Will you watch the fairies dance or perhaps bespy a unicorn some misty morn; will you watch the skies for a dragon or simply marvel at moon and star?  Life is ever so much more interesting if you believe in fairies, but most people are either too practical or distracted to even consider the possibility, but then I doubt fairies believe in warning labels either; if one must be a myth, I'd rather have fairies!