The Wonder of Silence...

It had been a difficult morning. Some children not getting on, a few scraped knees.

'Have I been doing forest school for too long?' I think to myself at 11.25am, as I pull yet another muddy saucepan out of the river.

And then this moment happened, and I remembered my 'why'. 'Oh yes. That's why.' I thought. 'I love my job, for moments likes this...'

We took a walk down to the lake, to sit on the jetty, watch the water and wait to see what might appear.

Getting to a place of stillness certainly took a little while. Sitting quietly and doing nothing but noticing isn’t easy for most children. In fact, it isn’t particularly easy for most adults either. So we worked our way towards it with some child-focused mindfulness activities – listening, noticing, tuning into our senses, focusing on our breath. Slowing ourselves down a little.

And then we got quiet. I whispered to the last of the shufflers, that the more quiet and still they could become, the more wildlife they would see.

For the first couple of minutes, not much happened.

And then, almost as if the woodland and the lake had been waiting for us to stop making so much noise, the wildlife started to come back.

The birds appeared first, swallows swooping across the water, great tits flitting through the trees. Buzzards started to circle overhead, calling to their mates on the hunt. A heron came down to the water and splash landed 50 ft away from the children. That's the point they started to believe me, and the awe descended.

In the next silent breaths, the moorhens wandered about peacefully on the lily pads, while iridescent dragonflies zipped around us, so loud in the silence, mating in the air before coming down to the surface of the water to lay their eggs. The bees buzzed in and out of the lilies.

And then, the large shadow of an otter moved in the periphary and something BIG broke the surface of the water.

The children could hardly believe their eyes. I could feel the excitement trying to burst out of them! But somehow, they contained it, because by this point, they were completely hooked. They wanted to know what would happen next. So they stayed there, silent, still.... Watching.

For fifteen minutes.

Around a third of the children in this particular group have some kind of diagnosis, and some are children who might usually be described as finding it difficult to sit still, concentrate or engage for any length of time. Yet here they were.

Nobody was telling them off for fidgeting, or repeatedly asking them to concentrate, and nobody was trying to make them sit still. They had simply found something worth being still for. After they'd settled into it, fifteen minutes of stillness and silence wasn't something being demanded of them; it was something they didn't want to end.

This kind of experience if so important for us all. Children and adults both, need opportunities to experience stillness; but not because being quiet and compliant is inherently good, but because slowing down for even five minutes gives them access to understanding about themsleves and the world around them that they simply cannot notice when everything is moving quickly.

A rustle in the reeds, the shadow of a buzzard passing overhead, the tiny ripples of an insect on the water that eventually reach out to the edges of the whole lake. These are the gentle whispers of nature that we can so easily miss, unless we can learn to really listen... and if we ignore them right through to adulthood, we might just wake up one day and discover we can no longer hear nature speaking to us at all.

We talk a lot about children’s attention spans; about their ability to focus, and about children who “can’t sit still”. But attention looks very different when there is meaning attached to it.

I feel that curiosity, awe and wonder, rather than discipline, are the doorways to authentic focus.

I have no idea whether any of these children had ever sat quietly beside a lake and watched wildlife like this before, but I have a feeling they’ll want to do it again. And that, for me, is the magic of what we're doing here, delivering these sessions. We're not teaching children that they should care about the natural world, we're giving them the time and space to fall a little bit in love with it themselves. And there, in all of that, is my 'why'. Thanks for the reminder kids.