The nature spirits and the 8 year old's "Why?!"

      The dance of the spiral comes again to my eight year version...ready to romp and play and love and delight. There is no doubt they are just right, made as they should be, perceiving correctly, wild and free, experiencing no limitations. It's all just a game.
     I took the children to the park. They are never interested in the playground equipment very much. Nope, it's down to the fast moving, ungroomed side of the river we go!
    As we descended down the bank amongst the reeds and wild things, my imaginings were invaded by images of snakes and such things, for my children it was bear they thought they had heard and would see....."Nature spirits trying to scare me", I think. It stops immediately. I was on to their gig. Then came the question that so resonates with the eight year old version of me, and one my son asked recently..."WHY?!", a pleading for some deep, higher purpose for the pruning, the shaping, the instructing, the tearing up and devastating so not understood by the eight year old human and youngest of the trees who sees this happening on the other side of the river.......there is no honest answer that would suffice. We answer all right..fear, control....but the only answer that would suffice would be if it ceased to happen, that all things would be allowed to grow wild and free. That is why I sacrifice anything it takes to "radically whole life unschool" my children, interfere as little as possible, allowing them their own beliefs, perceptions, sleeping patterns, eating habits, etc.
    The children covered themselves in mud, Cort in showing me how to camouflage one's self and Rusty in just slipping and sliding about on the banks, doing her usual squat style sitting. The one thing the park does have that does draw us is huge old-style metal swings. The climate won't accommodate the cheap stuff, so the swing sets are big enough and tough enough to take a grown ass adult swinging as high as I can get them...flying! So, we dried off swinging on the swings. I took these nature spirits with me. It was not so big a thing to them, not a real reason for cutting down their friends. That weightlessness we feel while swinging, it's their perpetual state of being, even amidst the depression they feel when a human being comes near them. Just like young children can't overpower adults, the trees cannot overpower human machines. There can be playing on fears, causing fighting amongst them, but when it comes to physical power, we are helpless against them. So, in companionship, we swang.  I laid face down, spread eagle upon the grass, drawing in deeply the smell of the earth beneath me as the children dug in the sand.
   We came home eventually, the children quickly falling to sleep. I sat outside and even though it had not rained, I saw a rainbow in the sky and I heard "Thank you". Just like I am with my children at 8 and 9 yrs old, I make no excuses, no justifications, not trying to talk anyone out of their sense of injustice, especially when it is the same as mine. A desire to be no where near fellow humans still lingers......I realize that is probably why at 8 years old as I fell from the top of a tree, it's branches had cradled me so that my landing was soft and without injury, why the ground always seemed to rise to meet my feet and I could romp and play without any real injury from anything. Nature and I were resonating, as one in our "WHY?!" declaration of the injustice we felt we were experiencing. It also helped me let go, feel safer not "helicopter parenting" my children while we were there..they're resonating with nature with their "WHY?!" declaration...and yes, when we got home, they were both "Just leave me alone".......not wanting anything from another human being.