The Wonder in an Acorn
Several days ago, I walked with my daughter at Pleasant Hill Preserve: 161 acres of conserved land in Scarborough, Maine, with toddler-friendly trails that wind through meadows and forests. In the middle of October, these trails offer a trove of treasures to place in palms and pockets. Acorns. Fallen and falling leaves. Thick clusters of silver-white seeds that have recently replaced bursts of goldenrod flowers. Tufting cattails. (We stopped to giggle at how the cattails looked a bit like hotdogs, and this would later prove to help my daughter remember their names.)
Aspen turned three a month ago and her delight at the world is not only palpable in the movements of her body but ever-expressed in her growing vocabulary. She speaks words that, if uttered from the mouth of an adult, would almost certainly sound sarcastic or ironic, but from her are utterly sincere. “Oooooh!” she says. “WOW!” And “This walk is SO FUN!”
© Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
I delight in her delight. Through her eyes, I find myself regaining my own sense of awe, a sense that has occasionally blinked away now that I’m well into my adult years. But even when I do find myself balanced briefly on a swell of awe, I often come crashing down into worry, doubt, and fear.
I worry, for instance, about the day my daughter will ask me what climate change is. How will I explain it to her? I fear that we are bringing her up in a world that is suffering and transforming, already, right here, right below her feet. Here among the wildflower seeds and the October nights that have brushed the meadow in copper and gold. The Gulf of Maine is among the fastest warming oceanic regions on Earth. After one of the wettest Junes on record, autumn arrived weeks late. We get occasional messages from friends—recently back in Maine after a stint in California where they became accustomed to noticing air quality warning—letting us know the wildfire smoke is bad again and we should consider staying inside.
Aspen does not yet see these things. As such, I feel that she exists in a narrow, precious window of time where she can revel in an uncomplicated delight at the world. As her mother, I try to make the most of this time by helping her build a foundation of undiluted, unpolluted love and wonder and care for the place where she lives. My husband and I give her time to notice the acorns, the chance to whoop with joy when leaves shake down from the trees.
We do this because it seems to me that the only way for her to bear the pain of the ecological losses and changes she will witness in her lifetime is for her to be prepared to match those many griefs with an even greater love. Making room for that love to find her and flourish within her is one of my primary jobs as her mother. If she can learn to love the Earth—this bit of Earth on which we live—then she can stand strongly for it. She can act on its behalf. It can be her source of strength. And, perhaps, she will be a source of strength, in turn, for the places she will call home.
I’ve been returning to a quote from Rachel Carson’s 1955 essay “The Sense of Wonder,” later adapted into a slim book. It sits on my shelf and I often find myself reaching for it. Carson wrote this book for her grand-nephew Roger with whom she explored the woods and shores of Maine from her summer home on Southport Island, a little over an hour north of where we live in Portland.
In it she writes: “A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.”
Carson wishes for every child “a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”
For this is the true cause of the climate crisis, is it not? Alienation from the sources of our strength. Rachel Carson knew it over sixty years ago. That our growing separation from the living world has wrought disastrous consequences.
I walk behind my daughter on these protected trails and I consider how moving through this climate crisis will certainly require the good work of conservation. Preserved pockets of land like Pleasant Hill Preserve where eastern bluebirds and Carolina wrens flit and fly, where cattails grow, and squirrels cart away loads of oak-dropped acorns. I consider all the creatures who will need many, many more such protected lands and waters. And I consider how conservation will not be enough. Nor will LED light bulbs or recycling or electric cars or AI-powered solutions.
For as the Earth undergoes these transformations, we will be transformed, too.
In this time where three billion birds have vanished from the United States and Canada in the last fifty years, where wildfires are gaining intensity year to year, where just about every month is breaking a record for the hottest month in history, where war is ongoing in Ukraine and war is ramping up in Israel and Gaza, and where the list of injustices seems to be so unending that despair seems the only justified—the only possible—response, I’m going to make the frivolous-sounding argument that what we most need is to reorient ourselves to love, joy, wonder. I want to argue that, in addition to the needed work of climate science, of activism, of witnessing, of grieving, of seed saving, there is the needed, transformative work of healing, achieved through turning back to the sources of our strength. A childlike sense of wonder and awe, an expansive love, the capacity for imagination and joy: are not these the strongest aspects of our humanity?
Standing on such a foundation gives us the footing from which to begin to mend this separation between ourselves and the Earth.
This is one of my jobs as a mother raising a child in a fraught world. But it is not just my job as my daughter’s mother. It is my job as a citizen of this Earth, as a fellow creature among many creatures. It is your job, too.
Imagine with me: what if we offered the places where we live an unflinching, unfailing, unconditional love? The sort of love a mother gives her child. What if we then acted on behalf of that love?
By this I do not mean that we bury our heads in the sand, or lose ourselves in beauty while the world suffers and cries out. No, by this I mean that we must orient those best parts of ourselves toward land, water, and the beings who inhabit them, including our fellow human beings, so that something as simple as an acorn in our palm might ignite within us a fierce joy, might remind us that this wonderful, wounded Earth on which we stand—each in the place we call home—is ever worth saving.
Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder is the author of Rebirth: Mothering Through Ecological Collapse, forthcoming from Broadleaf Books in Spring 2025. Her writing can also be found in Emergence Magazine, The Common, Crannog Magazine, the EcoTheo Review, the edited poetry collection Writing the Land, and in Katie Holten's The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape. She lives with her family in Portland, Maine.