Did you have a favorite book as a child? I had lots of them, but one that I returned to again and again was the remarkable work of Francis Hodgson Burnett called the Secret Garden. It was written in 1906, so this original cover didn’t look anything like my copy, but her very mundane and highly magical story captured my imagination as a child, and grew up with me into a more complex understanding of the relationship between humans and nature.
If you never read the book, here’s the cliff notes version: A neglected, unpleasant little orphan is sent from India to Yorkshire to live in the nearly-empty mansion of her only remaining relative who pretty much ignores her and leaves her to wander the large empty gardens. She is an unloved and unloving child, whose first glimmer of curiosity is awakened by a story she hears about a “mysterious garden” locked up and unvisited for more than ten years. With that act of curiosity she begins to transform from a spoiled miserable creature who thinks only about herself, to a child capable of the greatest of all human acheivements:
Wonder.
Mary was an odd, determined little person, and now she had something interesting
to be determined about, she was very much absorbed, indeed.
Wonder takes her out of herself and allows her to stop thinking about being hot, tired, bored or lonely, and start thinking about “maybe” and “what if”. The story of the garden was the first and most important signpost on Mary’s journey from self-preoccupation to compassion. A common robin becomes the second, and she is startled out of herself into watching this beguiling and plucky creature.
She heard a chirp and a twitter, and when she looked at the bare flower-bed at her left side there he was hopping about and pretending to peck things out of the earth to persuade her that he had not followed her. But she knew he had followed her and the surprise so filled her with delight that she almost trembled a little.“You do remember me!” she cried out. “You do! You are prettier than anything else in the world!”
Mistress Mary forgot that she had ever been contrary in her life when he allowed her to draw closer and closer to him, and bend down and talk and try to make something like robin sounds. Oh! to think that he should actually let her come as near to him as that! He knew nothing in the world would make her put out her hand toward him or startle him in the least tiniest way. He knew it because he was a real person–only nicer than any other person in the world. She was so happy that she scarcely dared to breathe.
Now the psychologist in me recognizes that this is a parable about the way humans can awaken their awareness and interest in others by contact with the natural world. This is solid science, and it’s why we get our children goldfish and hamsters and eventually dogs. It’s probably why children with a vocabulary of less than 500 words still spend hours learning what a pig says and what a duck says even though they no longer live on the farm. We learn about our impact on others through the natural world. The gentleness and ruthlessness of nature prepares us for the complexities of a lifetime of socialization. Nature is a bridge that stretches from our deepest self to the benign awareness of others. That’s why cruelty to animals is one of the early signs of sociopathy. Lucky humans travel that bridge and come out better on the other side.
The psychologist in me understand this, but the child in me just wanted to find that garden.
Which is what most of us wanted the first time we went to see the beavers. Somehow we heard about them and wanted to see for ourselves. Curiosity made us seek them out, but wonder made us come back.
The child in the story becomes curious about a walled garden, and this matures into curiosity about the things that live in that garden. At the end of that book her entire interpersonal world of four gathers inside that garden and we see she is fully anchored not just to her environment, but also to her new and emerging sense of self, and ultimately her community.
Sound familiar?
Heidi P. Perryman, Ph.D.
