It's All Energy

Written August, 2020

At the start of lockdown, my son was given the following home learning task.

“Go outside and find 5 living things and 5 non-living things.”

Simple enough, right.

But it wasn’t. Well for me it wasn’t. All I could think was “it’s all energy, why aren’t they teaching kids this?”

My husband pointed out that that would probably be slightly advanced learning for pre-k. So I came back to earth, and we observed some flowers (living), birds (living), ants (living), stones (non-living), sand (non-living), wood bark (non-living), clouds (non-living)…

And I was not a happy student.

In fact, I was as unhappy as the time my mother made me clean out the contents of my jewellery box when I was approximately pre-k age. I had filled it with treasure… old flowers I’d found, hair bands, hair clips, some sweet wrappers from a party, and a (mouldy) apple core.

Sounds like a mini horror scene from a hoarders documentary, and I can understand now why that apple core should not have been there, but let me explain. I’m not a hoarder. Never have been (apart from that little treasure collection), never will be (read honour your nest). But I remember feeling achingly guilty about just throwing these things away. Where were they going? A part of me felt that everything down to that mouldy apple core had a spirit and I wanted to save what I could. Most people brush this off as animism.

Animism:
The belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence. 
The attribution of a living soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena.

And society has hoped that most will quickly outgrow this apparently childish belief. My question is why?

In my observations of society over the past decade (parenting asked me to put some spectacles on), I saw my children growing up in an astounding throwaway culture. A culture in which something just had to seem irrelevant and it would be turfed.

And I thought, children begin life seeing the energy and magic in everything, why don’t we run with that. Instead of dividing things into living and non-living what if we asked:

Is this life?

Is the Sun life? Yes! Its energy beams down and is transformed into nourishment in our plants.

Is a plant life? Yes! It feeds us and other animals and gives us the air we breathe.

Is a stone life? Yes! The minerals within it also nourish.

Is salt life? Goodness yes!

And the microbes on that stone? Life? Yes! Possibly the most foundational, vital life.

Is a mouldy old apple core life? Yes! Well, probably not if I ate it, but if you popped it into the compost and allowed it to do its work… well, you have the foundation for new life.

Is your glass of water life? Yes! Imagine if we showed children that music and their words alone could change the structure of the molecules in their cup? And that that could change the energy of their own little bodies?!!

And the music that played from my jewellery box? I know more than a few people would would agree that that was most definitely life. I can still hear it.

And the question I have is this…

How would the world change if we nurtured this appreciation of life from the start. Nurtured this ability to see that everything has some intrinsic value in the fabric of life. Nurtured this ability to see that everything is energy… always has been, always will be. Infinitely. It wouldn’t be hard, because little people already feel this.