Children and Nature Awareness Month (is ending)

April is (I should say was) Children and Nature Awareness Month. Of course, it's also Autism Awareness Month and Cesarean Awareness Month (by which I assume they mean the doubly-life-saving but very dramatic procedure I underwent, not the Roman dude). In fact, April is Frog Month; Informed Women Month; Month of the Young Child; Prevention of Animal Cruelty Month; School Library Month; and National DNA, Genomics and Stem Cell Education and Awareness Month. While I wholeheartedly support all of these, I feel like I should apologize for not commemorating Children and Nature Awareness Month at ANY time during this month. I mean, it's sort of my thing. I did write a 216-page manuscript on it. I do tend to preach on it. I did write a hero-worshippy e-mail to Richard Louv.

Partly, I've been busy. But mostly -- and I think it's both to my detriment and maybe sometimes (hopefully) to my credit -- it's just not my way. I suck at gaining followers to causes. I just don't care about starting movements. I'm more of a be-there-and-chill type person. Who the hell am I to start a drive or movement or whatever? A person who wrote a really long essay about traipsing about in the desert? So what?

But I think maybe that's not what Children and Nature Awareness Month is about. It's about being close. Physically, emotionally, regularly close to the world around you, down to its smallest, hairiest, squishiest bits and up to the stuff that is so enormously big as to make you feel insignificant, but in an oddly uplifting way. It definitely takes both kinds, the big and small of nature and the big and small of nature thinkers. I'm a small. I don't mean lesser. I just focus inward. I'm pretty discouraged sometimes that I'm not the movement-starter type. What I do want to be, though, is the type who keeps it up anyway. With no followers. With nothing for me to follow except the boy beside me and the caterpillar inching from my finger to his. With no validation except his smile.

So I didn't blog Children and Nature Awareness Month. It wasn't to make this sappy entry, either. It was because I didn't want to. I wanted to do it.

I've got some plans in mind for specific features. I'd like to do some insect posts, maybe venomous critters, definitely locales. My son, actually, wants to start a weekly-ish "David's animal stories," which I wholeheartedly support and would like to incorporate. (What do you all think? He originally wanted to tape it, but his videos make Cloverfield look stationary. He's wanting to do mostly pictures with "a short story," he said.) But I didn't spend the month pitching Children and Nature Awareness Month. I was greedy. I just grabbed my kid, and we enjoyed it ourselves. I hope you don't mind.

You really should do this every month anyway.