I recently discovered an outdoor activity that is wonderful to share with a child, called “geocaching.” All it takes is a GPS receiver and a sense of adventure. It’s basically a world-wide treasure-hunting game where participants hide, or try to find, “caches” of small toys and knickknacks which have been posted to a website with their coordinates, a description, and maybe a hint or two.

When I first found out about it, it sounded neat, “but surely there aren’t any hidden caches anywhere near this little South Louisiana town.” Au contraire, I quickly learned. The sport’s website has a cache search feature which quickly turned up a dozen or so within ten miles of our house!

The sport also encourages environmental responsibility and awareness.  Geocachers should practice CITO, or “Cache In Trash Out,” and clean up any trash they see on their outing.  Also, I have seen many caches that exist primarily to teach people about environmental features and nice, scenic areas that are “off the beaten path.”  I’ve learned a lot about my own town just by playing the game.

Of course, with my five-year-old, we don’t call it “geocaching.” With him, it’s simply “treasure hunting,” and he loves it. He’s learning some map-reading and other outdoor skills as we go. Because the caches are usually hidden in some outdoor wooded area, it’s a great way to get a little outdoor time together without it being a huge production.

For more information, visit the official site and read the FAQ.

The Daily Journal has a fascinating article that illustrates the shrinking radius we give our children to explore over the years by looking at the childhoods of four members of a British family. Great Grandfather was allowed to roam some six miles away from home to go fishing at the age of eight. Grandfather had about a mile radius of freedom, Mother about half a mile, and the now eight-year-old-child can only wander to the end of his block.

In what I consider a ringing endorsement of “druidic values,” psychologists are concerned about the mental health of the current and future generations due to lack of exposure to the natural world.

The report’s author, Dr William Bird, the health adviser to Natural England and the organiser of a conference on nature and health on Monday, believes children’s long-term mental health is at risk.

He has compiled evidence that people are healthier and better adjusted if they get out into the countryside, parks or gardens.

Stress levels fall within minutes of seeing green spaces, he says. Even filling a home with flowers and plants can improve concentration and lower stress.

“If children haven’t had contact with nature, they never develop a relationship with natural environment and they are unable to use it to cope with stress,” he said.

“Studies have shown that people deprived of contact with nature were at greater risk of depression and anxiety. Children are getting less and less unsupervised time in the natural environment.

“They need time playing in the countryside, in parks and in gardens where they can explore, dig up the ground and build dens.”

One can hardly be surprised that I hug trees. I call myself a “modern druid,” after all, and isn’t that what druids are supposed to do? Hang around lots of trees? There is a lot to be said for hugging a tree, really. “Tree-hugger,” I know, is a common pejorative for hippies. But really, if you’ve never done it, just let go of your inhibitions and give it a try. When I do it, I feel such a connection to the earth, to the majesty of the living world. I feel the flow of life around me. Trees truly are majestic, noble beings and that is a sense of the tree you can best get by close physical contact.

But there is another form of tree-hugging that I indulge in and that I also invite you to try: tree climbing. It’s great physical exercise for one thing, and I’m all about that. But as a spiritual exercise, it has a lot going for it as well. Take whatever benefit your may get from tree-hugging and about quadruple it.

As I compose this, I am sitting in one of my favorite meditation places. I’m about 20′ in the air, in the branches of a moderately tall magnolia tree on our property. From here, I can look down on the roof of our two-story house, but more importantly, I am in the middle of a swarm of life all around me. It’s a completely different world from that of the ground a mere 20′ below.

You are not only feeling the flow of life, you are in it. Like a baby, cradled in its mothers arms, the boughs support you, gently rocking. You face your fears, climbing higher and higher, growing bolder, stronger, trusting more in the tree to support you.

In the branches of the tree, you are in a liminal space - a “between” place that is not Earth and not Sky, and is thus charged with spiritual potential. The liminality found in the branches of a tree was not lost on the Druids or ancient Norse. Consider the mistletoe, sacred at least in part because it grows neither on the earth nor under it, is not of the earth or of the sky. In Norse legend,  Loki crafted an arrow from the plant to kill Balder. In some tellings of the story, this was possible exactly because of those liminal qualities, having been missed by the Goddess Frigga in protecting Balder from all things of the four elements, or all plants that grow on or under the Earth.

Tree-climbing has grown from a child-hood pastime to something of an “extreme sport.” But it attracts a different sort of person from, say, rock climbing or snowboarding. Unlike other “extreme” activities, it isn’t so much the actual activity itself that engages most practitioners, the climbing into the tree, but the time they spend when they get to where they are going high in the branches. There, they may spend hours relaxing, may even sleep in a specially made hammock, or may just do what I do: commune with nature in an entirely different way than is possible on the ground.

The activity can be taken up relatively inexpensively and safely. It also doesn’t require much physical conditioning. The technical equipment needed costs about $300 or so to get started. That covers the cost of a special harness, rope, and the equipment to protect the tree and the rope from each other. So far, I haven’t used any of that, instead just “free-climbing,” but I’m limiting my options thereby. Unlike in rock climbing, tree climbing gear isn’t so much for safety as it is to open up options and to make it possible to get to places you otherwise can’t reach.

A few good sites for more information are:

Tree Climbers International

New Tribe

Dancing With Trees

Spanish moss hangs from nearly every tree where I live. In researching various primitive technologies, it cured to me that Spanish moss must have a bunch of uses. It does. I knew about its use as furniture stuffing, but just how good a stuffing it is really surprised me.

I found this nifty article: The Story of Spanish Moss, which told me many of the things I wanted to know. One sentence in particular got me very excited: “No known insect will attack moss fiber, eat, destroy or live within it. Moss ranks next to curled hair in resiliency. That is why it is desirable for use in upholstery.” Wow. Concerning sleeping outdoors, would a bed of Spanish moss on the ground keep ground insects away? Would a screen of moss over a hut entrance keep out mosquitoes? The possibilities are very intriguing.

I also read about Natives in Florida who wore clothes made out of the moss’ fibers. Would that also work in keeping the bugs off? If you haven’t guessed, finding natural, primitive ways of keeping the mosquitoes at bay is something of a concern to me. If you lived in South Louisiana, you’d surely understand why. It seems that if the Native Americans who lived here before we came had a solution, then we should be able to figure it out.

A recent article on NationalGeographic.com points out that the devastation wrought upon New Orleans by Katrina was, in fact an un-natural disaster. In short, the levees and canals we’ve built have caused unnatural errosion and allowed salt water in to the swamps, destroying thousands of acres of cypress, a natural barrier to the ravages of storms. “Had those cypress swamps been in place, the levees probably wouldn’t have failed.”

Ah, my beloved cypress trees. If only we had understood how sacred you really are.