Seasoning a Kid

How do you help young children to understand time when they can’t comprehend the days of the week, much less full seasons? In this thoughtful essay for Emergence Magazine, writer and filmmaker adam amir reveals what he calls his practice: a process of returning to the land to experience the richness of winter, spring, summer, and fall as they unfold on the unceded land shared by the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations in British Columbia.

When animals wash across the land, we go to meet the migration. We camp at stopover sites, nestled between swaths of soybeans, to watch sandhill cranes and snow geese fill the sky. We wade into marshlands and stumble onto swans, floating off a delta island where the river meets the sea. We ferry to gulf islands to see the sea explode with all who come to feast on herring, streaks of deep-green seawater turning tropical turquoise in the haze of eggs. A few seasons later, we walk up rivers, greeting chinook, then pink, sockeye, chum, and finally zombie coho spawning out in the snow.

Barry Lopez describes migration as the land breathing. He sees it as one great breath, the light and animals drawn north, inhaled, held, then released south with an exhale. With your face in the wind of wing beats, in the pulsing of a thousand dunlins, in the bursts and blasts of hundreds of snow geese, it can feel like the land is breathing before you.