A Season of Wild Innocence

One summer afternoon, around seven years old, I was walking on my own in the middle of a dusty, dry creek bed. I’d wandered past the pond behind our house in the suburbs of Northern Virginia and into the woods. There were branches on the ground and fallen logs along the edges. I was off-leash, following my curiosity like a dog sniffing a scent, tongue out and panting, led by instinct. As I returned from my adventure, backyards began to appear through the trees. I glanced at the houses for clues of when to climb out.

When I saw the familiar blue-gray aluminum siding through the thin canopy, I headed to the side of the creek and planted a foot in the slope, which sunk into the soft dirt. The creek edge was steep, so I leaned forward onto my hands and placed my other foot higher up on the bank only for my back foot to slide down. I brushed the dirt off my hands and tried again, crawling quickly to where my outstretched arm could grab ahold of a branch jutting out from a dead tree. As my grip squeezed down on the wood and I pulled myself up, the branch snapped and dragged its sharp point across my closed eyelid, millimeters away from blinding me. Blood leaked from the gash into my eye. My heart rate spiked as I scrambled out of the woods through a backyard onto the cul-de-sac at the bottom of the street where I lived. I ran up the hill and through the front door of my house where I could wash the wound. If I look in a mirror and close my right eye, I can see the scar with my open left eye, some 35 years later.

I wonder how the degree to which we feel safe to explore during childhood forms associations that encourage or inhibit our lives as adults. I wonder how the past conditions our mind and situates a particular self at the center of our consciousness, a self whose learned responses and preferences are a prism that color, if not dirty, our perception. I wonder how complex or acute trauma bloodies the eye and leaves us seeing red.

These questions are up for me because I long to restore my relationship to the wider world, to other species, to plants, to all of life. I wish for a return of—in a phrase—my wild innocence.

Innocence, author Annie Dillard says in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, is “the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object.”

In her definition, innocence begins with spirit, what we recognize we are when not identified with the physical body. Next is an odd hyphenated phrase that points to a conscious state in which there is no self present, suggesting that the absence of a self doesn’t require un-consciousness. The final element is an absorbing love of a person, place, or animal—anything other than yourself.

One morning this summer such innocence unveiled itself. I was standing on the exposed-stone driveway in front of my house, beneath a towering Douglas Fir, encircled by dropped pine cones. A Dark-eyed Junco hopped on the ground near my feet, a Song Sparrow and Black-capped Chickadee bobbed on outstretched branches, and a Blue Jay flew overhead into a tree in a neighbor’s yard. Above the scene a hummingbird hovered as if orchestrating the birdsong that was seasoning the air.

Squirrels chased each other along the top of my next-door neighbor’s rickety wood-slatted fence. One bounded ahead, springing off the pincushion moss and scampering up a maple tree, where for a moment it disappeared in the foliage. Then came a flutter from the cherry laurel hedge behind me. I turned around as a bronze-breasted American Robin strutted onto the driveway. A chick followed. The robin darted ahead and when it came back, the chick headed toward it, for there was a worm dangling from its beak to eat.

Two yellow paper wasps zigzagged along the green hedge in what appeared to be a reconnaissance mission. I tailed them through the fence gate into the backyard by the rodent mound. There, under the eaves of the garage, was their nest.

So much life, mere steps from my front door! All I had to do was notice.

I’d seen enough. I headed inside, but on my way in I noticed one more detail: a wasp entangled in a spider’s web.

The Rounded Shoulder Orb Weaver rappelled down to the wasp like an expert alpinist. As soon as it made contact the wasp buzzed its wings in dire protest, but was unable to escape. One of its legs was ensnared by a strand of the web. The orb weaver retreated to its corner before making another calculated descent. I watched four rounds of this before leaving them alone to finish the fight.

The next morning there was no wasp in the web, only a mummified ball. The spider had won.

This eco-voyeurism comes naturally to us humans, and invites a mystical merging of “human” and “nature,” a dissolution of boundaries and distinct categories. To read Annie Dillard is to ingest a psychedelic, to look through a cleansed lens—to see, innocently.

“These are our few live seasons,” Dillard writes. “Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.”