In the jungle

A couple of days ago, Helena Iara and I began to climb the tall hill behind our house, a wonderful little intact jungle in the middle of the neighborhood (in fact, it was only reforested from a coffee and banana plantation in the 1950s, but the Atlantic Rainforest recovers so quickly in Brazil that parts of the jungle seem virgin).  We have hiked the steep trail before, but always when Helena was so little that we had to put all of our effort into not falling off the rocks into the mud.  This time was different: she was stable enough on her feet that she could look at things.

At first, Helena wanted to experiment with gravity: if she threw a rock down the path, how far would it go?  And a leaf?  A stick?  What about a flat rock?  As she began to pull too many leaves from the bushes, however, I tried to explain why plants need their leaves, with a brief digression into photosynthesis and the sun.  Who knows how much Helena understood, but when we explain a "no" to her, she generally goes along with us (an unexplained rule, on the other hand, will inevitably be broken!), and this was no exception: she stopped pulling the leaves from the plant.

The first biology lesson went so well that I took advantage of a rest break to talk about water, and we traced the roots of trees as they went to the trunks of the trees, and then looked at how each tree was different from the others.  From time to time (and much to my pride) she often said "pretty cool," her favorite term of approbation.

Now, I don't have any illusions about Helena remembering anything about ecology from the walk up the mountain.  Much like so many of my talks about philosophy during her first year of life, the content wasn't the point at all.  If there is any lesson I wanted to pass on, it was to pay attention to nature, to look carefully at it.

As we walked down the steep slope, she wasn't content simply to go home.  She needed to stop at every fallen seed or fruit on the ground, and then either pry it open or ask me to break it open with a rock.  Her curiosity has always run rampant: I didn't teach that.  But she had found some new things to pay attention to, to look at carefully.

Pretty cool.