Why Outside Play is Important

Let’s go outside. Let’s know in our bones that we aren’t just on the Earth, but we are part of the Earth. Let’s go inside. Let’s connect with each other heart to heart.

As a teacher for thirty-five years and also as a mother, I’ve aimed at creating activities that foster an attitude, an awareness, an appetite for the Earth that once awakened, remains and shapes a human life. Sometimes I call it moving into Green Time because it’s a quality of interaction and connection that can happen seated on a couch as well as walking through the woods. It's the basis for what we do at Journey Camp.

Standing by a stream or hugging a tree, we feel a rush of joy, a common feeling that people have felt throughout the ages. I want to express that sense of bonding in song lyrics. In the 1970’s I wrote “My Roots Go Down” and “Two Hands Hold the Earth” which A Gentle Wind released in 1984. At Journey Camp for fifteen years, we've had amazing moments of nature exploration. My new song collection called “Pocketful of Wonder,” my eighth recording, shares new songs that have the same purpose, the same heartbeat.

Caring interactions open a space of reflection and connection that feed a child. The transformative mood of Green Time can happen in a field, in the woods, being with a tree in the park, or inside your home.

Responding to the Earth has, until very recently, always been an integral and assumed part of a young person’s life. Richard Louv writes in his book Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder—“The young spend less and less of their lives in natural surroundings, their senses narrow, physiologically and psychologically, and this reduces the richness of human experience….As one scientist puts it, we can now assume that just as children need good nutrition and adequate sleep, they may very well need contact with nature.”

At Journey Camp we join the work of parents and teachers to assure and encourage direct time in nature. Electrical media has a pull on our nervous system that happens unwittingly and insidiously. Rather than feed the very recent pull of electricity, we need to feed the ancient pull of trees and sky. Our bodies—our brains and hearts—evolved from the direct source of nature, and we require that contact for our very physical, social, and moral development.

While young brains are forming, they call for the good food of direct encounter with people, plants, grass and streams. The wonder of a flower opening, the fresh smell of rain, the joy of walking in mud—these encounters awaken our basic bonding with the earth.

What we need also includes person to person time. Human interactions are also potent in countering nature deficit disorder. Our caring staff pause with children to foster person-to-person connection.