Seeing the forest ....and the possibility.....

I don't remember when I first met Peter Rabbit--yes, THE Peter Rabbit--but I wasn't a young one.  I also don't remember where I met him.....but like so many others, when I saw him, I was smilingly and irresistibly drawn to this curious fellow.  Later it was his creator that I admired, but I kept returning to his stories and his friends, especially as my girls grew and came to be curious about Peter and his antics.

Not quite a year ago, I came upon Linda Lear's biography of Beatrix Potter--and found a friend.  The life of this woman writer and illustrator is fascinating, in a quiet way, and I'm sure that's what drew Lear into the lengthy study she has created of Potter.  But for me, the pleasure has been finding a kindred spirit--a woman who looked at the world with both an eye to keen observation and a bent to the joy that comes from that looking.  While she loved the real creatures that inspired her child-literature, her pleasure in a good wink is just as obvious.

And she loved the land--the beautiful Lake District of northern England and the hills of Scotland--so much so that her estate went to the National Trust of England, ensuring that her lands would be protected and accessible for the generations to come.  Mercy, I love this woman.

But the kinship is the gift.  Potter loved fungi.  She studied them and drew them and pondered their existence with a keen eye to scientific detail and questioning.  She marveled at them..and I'll bet she smiled at them.  I do.  There's that element of possibility that resides in a good fungus, and I get the feeling, when I see one, that something has to have just taken place right where it stands.  I just didn't see it.

But I can imagine it. 

As I read about Potter's draw to the study of fungi--a growing fad in her era in England--I could see how much her clear handling of specifics and her objectivity in her study informed her writings for children.  Her images bring real nature to rest in a perfectly believable fantasy world of rabbits with blue coats and ducks with kerchiefs. In this time of so much contradiction and falsehood reeling out on printed pages, the sweet paradox of a purposeful fantasy informing a real world is an immediate source of pleasure.

So Potter was with me on my too fast trip to Big Sur....she smiled, I'm sure of it, when the little ground squirrel caught us off guard and waited to see if we might have a bit of something for him as he scoured the ground and bushes.  I could see a little tam o'shanter sitting a bit cocked on his head and a crisp little comment setting us straight.  If you walk on his path, you better have some crumbs with you.

We didn't...and good thing, too, because we were in a natural reserve and definitely wouldn't want the wrath of rangers sending us home.

I'm not trying to "cutesify" the natural world or bring unwarranted personification to this amazing little creature.  But in reading about Potter's life, her choices, her disappointments and perseverance, and her great sense of being, I think we need a bit more of that understanding in this world where so many false dealings make us wonder if anything's real.  The joy of a good story, and the knowing that goes behind it, just does a body good.

In just a few months, we will welcome a sweet baby boy into our lives.  I can't wait to introduce him to Peter and all the others, and to share the natural world with its wonders--a few fungi here and there, a bevy of bugs to explore, a bright leaf and the look of the sun shining through it.  I know I'll be smiling and laughing and Potter would understand completely.  She's a good friend.