STORIES FROM THE ARTS 63
Of the teacher who calls us
To honour the teacher who arrives
In ourselves.
Today I find shelter
In this nest woven of words
And I name this place Beauty.
Sally Atkins (2012, p.232)When I (Sally) have the opportunity, I like to walk in the forest with
my four-year-old granddaughter, Laurel. Laurel and her family live
in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, a much different and equally
beautiful mountain landscape. When she visits her Papa and her
Neena Longhair, as she has named me, in North Carolina, we share
a ritual of offering “gifts to the fairies” in the forest. We leave a few
tiny beads in small acorn cups in the shelter of stones, under leaves
or at the base of trees. In doing so, we notice the trees and the stones
and the small plants around them. We touch the bark of trees, rough
or smooth or old and peeling. We look up to see the sky through
the branches of the tall trees and listen to birdsong in high branches.
Laurel sometimes likes to collect leaves of different colors to use in
subsequent art projects. When we take leaves or sticks or stones, we
ask permission, offering back a bit of our garden herbs or a bead as a
symbolic gesture of gifting back to the Earth, a practice I have learned
from native friends. And we say thank you, acknowledging in a small
way how much the Earth gives to us. Laurel likes to learn the names
of trees, and she is especially delighted to find the mountain laurel,
the shrub that shares her name. Since the land where I live holds
remnants of Earth’s oldest forests, there is a rich variety of flora and
sometimes animals to observe in every season. Besides the delight of
our imaginative possibility of the lives of the fairies and how they
might decorate their dresses or wings or make necklaces from our
little gifts, we also pay attention to our surroundings, to the sounds
of the stream and the smell of the Earth. I am happy to cultivate and
participate in our joint sensory and imaginative experiences. On our