Learning from nature: The wild delight of slow walks through Davis with my son | Opinion
I take a walk with my 24-year-old son Jukie every day. For both of us, these walks provide most of our exercise and our opportunities for meditative wonder.
Living with profound autism, our bearded explorer Jukie has been attending a therapeutic “boot camp” (as we nicknamed it) in Elk Grove most mornings this year to work on behavioral and communication concerns. He and I make up for our time apart by taking walks in the afternoon, including during my slow commute to the UC Davis campus, where I teach writing and literature classes.
Davis greenbelts can be traversed as a series of wide loops, the largest of these near our home in South Davis. On the greenbelt, I can let Jukie lead the way without our having to worry about car traffic. Every young adult likes to express their agency by making undirected choices, and Jukie expresses his by insisting on frequent walks that start with a large, clockwise loop, sometimes making eye contact and raising his arm when he wants to change direction.
My wordless son prunes trees more than Chauncey Gardiner (from the novel “Being There”), breaking off small branches from the greenery that we pass on our walks. Sometimes we encounter the denuded branches and detritus of leaves from our previous excursions over the same footpaths. Considering one of Jukie’s favorite movies, I would say he scatters bits of the trees behind him the way Wall-E does earthen soil aboard The Axiom.
Jukie teaches me outdoor lessons about presence, love of nature and quiet fortitude. From his tree-trimming obsession, I learn about concentration and prioritization in a world that is dimmed by indifference.
In his essay “Power,” Ralph Waldo Emerson advises “stopping off decisively our miscellaneous activity, and concentrating our force on one or a few points; as the gardener, by severe pruning, forces the sap of the tree into one or two vigorous limbs.” Davisites can thank Jukie for strengthening all the reachable trees of our greenbelts, encouraging the concentration of all that sap.
On our walks, my literary hero Emerson returns to me often. As Jukie pauses to behold fast-moving clouds changing the light within a ring of trees, I think of a favorite line from Emerson’s essay “Nature”: “The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.”
As I wonder what Jukie might be thinking on our long walks, I consider Emerson’s words again: “The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other.”
And as I try not to lament to two-way conversations that Jukie and I will never share, at least using words, I remember Jukie’s itinerant enthusiasm, and that “in the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.”
These daily walks — quiet, habitual, deliberate and sometimes sparked by “wild delight” — prune away distraction for Jukie and me, thus letting the vital sap of communal presence rise.