The leaves of the beech, a lovely green until recently, come in the front door as you open it; now they are brown. And lying on the ground in profusion. Does your young child ask why they have turned that colour? And why, in a few months, they will be green again, and not lying on your doorstep? Rachel Carson, that wonderful woman whose Silent Spring was mentioned here the other day, produced a short book - she died before she could finish it - entitled The Sense of Wonder and believed that the greatest thing you could do for a child is to keep alive in his or her mind the inborn sense of wonder.
Why do leaves change colour and fall? Why do birds pass overhead in flocks in spring and autumn, coming and going to and from their breeding grounds? Why and how does the sea come in across the strand and then go out again? Why or how does the salmon come back, as a grown fish, to the very same little stream where it first emerged from the egg, and there breed again? How does it know that this particular stream - and they are often very small indeed - is its birthplace, when it has perhaps been out a thousand miles around the Atlantic Ocean?
How and why do all these things come to pass? She wished that there might be a good fairy to give to each child "a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life." To achieve this, of course, the child needs the companionship of at least one adult.
A parent might say, she suggests, "How can I possibly teach my child about Nature - why, I don't know one bird from another." But, she holds, it is not so important to know as to feel. The years of early childhood, she believes, are the time to prepare the soil. Once the emotions have been aroused, this will have lasting effect - more important to make the child want to know, "rather than put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate". (One could say the same perhaps of some city-bred adults - many indeed - who have not had the attentions of the good fairy in childhood. Never too late to learn.)
What, she asks, is the value of preserving and strengthening the sense of awe and wonder, this recognition of something beyond the boundaries of human existence? Answer: Such people are never weary of life, or alone.