After 4 1/2 months of life with Kai, I have a pretty good gauge on his likes and dislikes. These affinities usually depend on time, place, mood, and circumstance, but there is one constant: being outside. If Kai is being inconsolably fussy, I am nearly 100% certain that he will feel better once we are outside. It's really quite an amazing thing. Whether carrying him or putting him in the stroller, when Kai goes outside his worries are like a balloon that freed from ceilings and walls floats out and up into the stratosphere, disappearing from sight.
To try and pinpoint what it is outside in the open air that calms him would be a pointless reductionist venture that would, ironically, miss the point. What this does make me think about is how isolated our homes (and other buildings) are from the natural environment. How different would our lives be if we were in constant interaction with the elements? Not to suggest that we should live without shelter, but what if our homes allowed a more fluid exchange between the indoors and outdoors? I think about our first (and thus far only) camping trip with Kai where on the second night he slept for 12 hours straight. He has performed this feat a mere three times in his 4 1/2 months of life, which does not prompt me to make a causal link but at least makes me cock an eyebrow.
Lisa babysat Kai the other night (our first nighttime babysitting foray) and we got talking about this phenomenon of our buildings being so environmentally isolated. Right now, she is actually studying building design and how homes can, are, and have been built in ways that use the natural world to insulate or cool themselves through a natural transference of air and energy. This made me think of a trip I took as a freshman in high school to an Anasazi ruin that featured a ventilation system that ran throughout the complex whose design was all built upon the natural law of convection. Sometimes it seems like our civilization has gotten too clever for its own good. Less of what we do now is about working with natural forces than it is about overcoming them.
Lisa then elaborated on how much our current way of living isolated from the elements indoors prompts respiratory ailments and allergies because the air we breathe is so stale and recycled. But what about the less physical effects? What are the psychological, emotional, and spiritual effects of living so separated from the natural world?
All this being said I am happy in the house I live in. Maybe someday I could build a dream house that incorporates these ideas, but until then I have what I have. Winter is approaching, which will slow down the outdoor time a bit, but Colorado is still incredibly accommodating even with snow on the ground. Not only that, I can invite a bit more of the outside into my home in little ways. Saturday, Linda and I continued on our saga of making a more child-friendly home in anticipation of Kai's inevitable crawling, and in an effort to bring some of the outside world in, I dedicated one of our bookshelves in the living room as a nature table--arranging vines, leaves, pinecones, pieces of wood, stones (all of non-chokeable size of course!), etc. (I gleaned this idea from my Waldorf school world). The bookshelf below it will become a place to put nature table materials so that kids who come over can arrange and rearrange as it pleases them. It could use some characters, so I may add a cornhusk doll or some little felted animals, gnomes, or people so it can really turn into a story-scape for them to play with.
Anyway, as with everything, this relationship between indoors and outdoors is another piece of the ever-changing, ongoing puzzle of life. Another challenge, another creative opportunity.
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