The Free Child In Nature
Excerpt from chapter four of: More Than This, A Tenets of Truth Book by Eric E. Cane
Listen to the audio version on my podcast here
The Free Child in Nature is an important default way of thinking. It helps one realize those things meaningfully necessary to inspiration, creative freedom, and individual expression. It helps define one’s sovereignty, or right to self-determination and authority over their own person.
The Free Child in Nature is the freely sensing and exploring uninhibited child aware in her environment.
This child bears no trappings of society. No religion. No prejudice. No social convention or expectations.
Imagine an unmolested child who is free to roam in nature. For our purposes, nature is not harmful in any way, but open for her to extend herself in any direction.
She is free to pick her path driven by her curiosity, intuition, and genetic predispositions.
She is free to interact with her environment immersed in her senses, letting them fill her memories and future dream states, which inspire more curiosity and her unique expression.
She is free to sing, dance, draw with a stick in the dirt, or drop leaves in a stream to watch them be taken with the current. She connects intimately to what she witnesses, even imagining herself in flight with her companion birds.
She is free to witness the enormity of her surroundings without fear. In this freedom, she explores to the extent of her potential.
Her fresh eyes see even the smallest detail, because she is patient. She directs her resources to the task of curiosity and her uninhibited expressions resulting from it.
She hears her own voice; she is directed by it wholly. Her impulse is not hindered — nor directed — by fear or prejudice. She accepts what is before her as something to be explored. To be known.
She is alight, sensing the whim and flow of nature, inspiring internal references for what she sees, hears, smells, feels, tastes. She recalls this in the quiet of her thoughts to merge within her forming and continually refining state, later breaching the confines of her body.
This process of sensory self-referencing and expression helps form her identity. She is bolstered by what physical expression she has and learns the extent of her range.
She experiences the physical boundaries of the world — where it ends and she begins. She discovers how much she can push into it before it changes and how much it can push back against her before she changes.
I know of no person who hasn’t seen or heard a bird or felt the warmth of sun on their face.
The Child in Nature exists in that. Not only in the reflection of her senses, but where they can take her without physically moving.
She exists in the now and the remembered without prejudice. Her thoughts are colored by the sunlight that reaches her eyes and warms her skin. Through nature’s symphony in her ears.
Her senses bring her truth. Immersion in nature allows her to hear her own truth.
Inspired, she reflects her internal movement outward because she is accepted. Nature does not curb her expression or tell her it is wrong. It does not confine her to a specific kind of thought, movement, word or song.
Her expression is her passage in this life. Nature is her reminder companion of her intrinsic worth.
