Ravine Gifts

At Satellite Pines, the children and educators have been learning about place, our neighbourhood, our area, with waterways. For several months, this project has been inviting the children and educators to experimentations with water movements, to visit the local waterways of our area, and to build ongoing relations with the land. This project asks us to pay attention—or as a protest to the colonial language of transactional relations, I write that we are asked to give/gift our attention.

Our experiences of exploring waterways demands a kind of commitment to a particular kind of relationship.

The Renfrew Ravine has been a place that children have been coming into relation with. This relationship is a careful one of giving careful attention to the water, stones, soil, trees, and other lives that live in the ravine.

At the same time, the ravine invites the bare soles of children’s feet into its calm current, the hands of children to reach for the stones as we balance on all four limbs, and our fingers to run through the bushes to reach for its berries.

This isn’t a conventional way of being careful as children are typically asked, where they are asked to take on a “museum mentality” where we “look, but don’t touch” (Sobel, 2012) or on the opposite end, to keep ourselves safe by just looking. This is a different kind of being careful with place. Being careful so that both our bodies and the bodies at the ravine can be in bodily relation without aggression, without harm.

With this kind of being careful, we are asked to be carefully attentive—to slow down, to look closely, to pause. As we carefully give attention, we deepen our understandings of this place... the depths of the water, the trees that spontaneously let go of their leaves (and occasionally fall on our heads), the instability of some stones that lie in the waterway, the branches and roots that are strong enough to hold our hands while climbing, the bushes that yield berries, and much more. Here, reciprocity is key. Perhaps giving our attention means that we are giving a part of ourselves to the ravine, and the ravine—the water, the land—reciprocate to us the gifts that help us know our place.

But we must remember the ravine, the land, the waters, have been here much longer than us. It is when we give ourselves to this place, the space for reciprocity, response, and responsibility opens itself—regardless of whatever shape, form, movement, or inquiry we may encounter within it.