Wakaguku

Directions from nature

When the first generation of GPS’s came out, my mom was an early adopter. Prior to that, her poor sense of direction (which I have inherited) meant we often took meandering routes to arrive at our destinations.

Those original GPS’s were handy, albeit clunky, tools. My mom had to switch to “GPS Jack’s” voice because Jane was simply “too judgmental.” Jane’s “exasperated” cries of “recalculating” dripped with sarcasm.

“Oh shut up!” my mom would respond. 

My mom “didn’t need to be judged by a computer.”

Fair enough. 

“Gender” notwithstanding, I think the current GPS’s voices are all more euphonious and neutral. “They” have come to be faithful traveling companions for most of us. 

What does it mean to be lost?

I recently read

Jennifer Browdy, PhD

’s piece, A Paen to Getting Lost, about the modern GPS devices built into the mini computers we carry everywhere and how even as they liberate us from circuitous routes, they – and their ilk (Amazon, AI, etc) deprive us of the journey, of losing ourselves only to find ourselves. Browdy used the example of wandering the “stacks” at the library as a graduate student where a chance find led her to a decade of research about psychics! 

What happens when we never allow our young people to get lost, or to be lost?

Jennifer wondered. She extended her metaphor about getting lost to wandering thoughts, rambling imagination, meandering creativity, risk taking, innovation, and discovery.

Gut punch question. 

“Turn left at the church with a cross”

Back to my mom. 

I once overheard her giving directions to a friend. She was in our kitchen, the squiggly phone cord (!) stretched to the center island, phone wedged between her shoulder and ear, where she kept cooking while guiding her friend to a specific shop in Minneapolis, Minnesota. 

I pictured her friend on the other end of the line frantically chicken scratching notes on a cute notepad with a saying like “If the shoe fits, buy it in every color.”

Then you’ll turn left at the church with the cross.

my mom explained.

I sprayed my sip of water across the table. 

If you’ve never been to Minneapolis, perhaps you don’t know it’s an exceptionally churchy city. Like church-on-every-other-corner level of churchiness. Even still, you surely recognize the humor in describing a specific church by indicating it has a cross. 

But the thing is, I can see my mom’s sense of place so clearly in her choice of directions. She was picturing a specific church with a specific steeple and specific cross just around the corner from a specific shop she liked to visit when she went to the city. For a specific type of item. Probably for a thoughtful gift for a specific someone that she bought months in advance of a special day because they happened to mention how much they love birds or bikes or a certain type of tea. My mom still knows the houses and businesses and churches — landmarks for navigation — all around the city from her frequent jaunts over from our smaller town in Wisconsin. She oriented herself to these features of the urban landscape, creating her own sense of place.  

Handle Rock

For me, there is literally no city of any size that I could describe with this level of detail. My urban or built navigation is bad – especially if I’ve only ever traveled it in a car (I’m a bit better if I’ve been on bike or foot). At this point, I am nearly 100% reliant on a GPS in cities. Before GPS, I would have printouts of Mapquest directions and before that scribbled notes and lots of stops to ask friendly-looking people for directions.

Meanwhile, drop me in an open space – in forests and mountains or canyons and mesas or lakes and rivers – with a topographical paper map and I am found. 

In Jacob’s Chair area in southern Utah where I’ve slept under stars for some hundred nights within the same 64 square-mileish area, circumnavigating Jacob’s Chair – a geological feature in sandstone that looks like a giant chair from some angles – apparently named for a farmer who perished in a flash flood – I orient myself using specific rocks. Sometimes they are big ones like “UFO rock” and “Soft Serve Swirl” – names passed down from other people I know who’ve traveled these canyons. 

But sometimes they’re as small as my palm. 

I’ve exited White Canyon via Nook Canyon at least a half-dozen times. I could easily imagine myself giving this direction to a friend:

As you head out of Nook, about 30 feet off the floor of White Canyon, there’s a perfect hand-sized pocket in a rock. Use that to hoist yourself to the next ledge up.

I feel so at home in this particular system of canyons – Gravel, Long, White, Fry – that I have specific hollows where I stash my stuff, particular shelter-sized flat areas where I always like to pitch my tarp, places I like to sit and look over the canyons at specific times of day depending on the season and the light of the sun. I once even – impossibly – found my own bandana – lost a year earlier – about a mile downstream of where it fell off my head and spilled over a pour-off into a deeper canyon. Not even kidding. Here’s a picture for proof:

My co-leader on several of those trips, Cooper, found an intact arrowhead from the native peoples who made these canyons home. He leaves it tucked under a small rock to show students year after year and remind them of the cultural — peopled — stories of the land. 

I feel certain the Ancestral Puebloan people knew “Handle Rock.” 

I felt this same sense of place on Lowes Creek that flowed past my neighbor’s forested yard and in my own backyard woods growing up. In the waters surrounding Camp Manito-wish YMCA, especially around the Trout Lake Circle – a canoe route I first traveled when I was 12 and subsequently returned to as a teenager to lead trips there. I feel it a bit walking in my neighborhood here in Nairobi, especially when I visit my fallen tree sister, Mninga.

For me, being found is about being oriented to place. To nature. To rhythms. To and with community – both human and nonhuman. By sensory experiences and memories and moments.

I am more found when I’m a bit lost in the woods than I am when a GPS guides me.

So how can we all be found?

Right now, I am reading

Elizabeth Gilbert

’s book, The Signature of All Things, which keeps surfacing for me when I think about developing a sense of place. In it, Alma – the budding botanist main character – learns to tell time by plant behaviors.

“At five o’clock in the morning, she noticed, the goatsbeard petals always unfolded. At six o’clock, the daisies and globeflowers opened. When the clock struck seven, the dandelions would bloom. At eight o’clock, it was the scarlet pimpernel’s turn…”

Indeed, people have long understood the passage of time and oriented themselves to place by paying careful attention to nature. Noticing and following plant signals. Observing bird, mammal, and insect migrations and behaviors was – and is still in some dwindling places – about staying found (and alive) in the most fundamental way. Whole civilizations managed to navigate to far away islands using the stars alone to guide them. 

Jennifer Browdy, PhD

wondered:

What happens when we never allow our young people to get lost, or to be lost? 

I wonder – indeed I’m gripped by this worry —

What happens if we don’t know how to be found?

Wakaguku

I have an idea that won’t surprise you if you’ve been here before.

How about we reconnect students with nature through routine, bite-sized, apple-a-day nature-based learning in school?

As one hopeful illustration of what this is, I’ll offer a recent story from one of the amazing Good Natured Learning Teaching Fellows I work with here in Kenya. She sent me this picture of her students right outside of her school searching for “dudus” (bugs). This was just another day of teaching her students outdoors amongst the trees near her school.  

While searching, they came across a “Wakaguku” — the pupae of a copper underwing moth — long believed to give directions.

One of her learners spoke softly with the Wakaguku, asking her for guidance. 

Let’s all listen carefully to her answer.

❤️ B