Bob Hinkle, Ph.D.
Chief of Outdoor Education
Cleveland Metroparks
December is a month of gifts, they say. A month to greet old friends and family, a chance to look back, reflect on the year, and reach out with something tangible, a remembrance perhaps, something as a show of love or respect.
When I was a child, it seemed like December stretched on for weeks, filled with excitement and anticipation, happy and hopeful. And now, here decades later, it’s just become a flurry of year-end reports, budget analyses, and wondering where the past 12 months went.
Tangible objects take the place of time and love, and the haste of the year flows down into the last few weeks and evaporates there, leaving regret for all the things we should have done in its wake.
Shopping has become recreation in our society, and holiday shopping has become a contact sport. The malls and big box stores bombard us with visual overload, competing messages, and inane music recycled endlessly until our minds are numb. Advertiser’s fantasy becomes our reality, hawking the latest “must-have thing” as the way to self-satisfaction, or the perfect gift for loved ones.
The confusion of the mall mob mentality only further divorces us from ourselves and reality until, exhausted, we crave the relative quiet of the New Year’s holiday. Gift wrap goes quickly into a big plastic bag and in minutes, the holiday ends. We measure success by the things we have, not the things we become. No wonder the most joyful season is depressing for so many.
There are three simple gifts, and they are the only ones that matter. The gifts of love, time, and caring are the spirit of the holidays, and are the heart of the holiday season.
Love is the greatest gift. The shift from “caring about” to “caring for” is called stewardship by conservationists, but the effect is the same. Love is commitment, commitment of time and commitment of caring. It cannot be placed in a box and wrapped with colored paper, nor can it be given with a red bow wrapped around it, nor can it be delivered to distant loved ones by Federal Express. It is personal, and up-close, and right now. And it continues. It is action, not words, and it is expressed every day in the lives we lead. It is seldom splashy; it mostly comes quietly but steadily, day by day, until it becomes a way of life, a natural act, like breathing. It becomes an expression of who we are.
To that end, I offer this. Love, time and caring are not obtainable in any mall this season, or any season. They are gifts of the heart, and unique to you and me. They are not found in glittering decorations, or twinkling lights, or in mind-numbing music. They are gifts that are found in small quiet places and unexpected times. You can create them, if you try. They are as homespun as a hand crafted chair, not always arriving in a beautiful package, but always meaningful and comfortable and a place to which we always want to return.
“Nature never did betray the heart that loved her,” poet William Wordsworth offered more than two centuries ago, and I believe it. Nature, whether created by an intelligent hand or gently changing over time, is the ultimate source of our peace, and of our strength. A nation at war with nature is a nation at war with itself, and becomes a nation grounded on fear and loathing of other people, creatures, and places less understood.
Nature offers each of us the gifts we need, whether a source of inspiration and connection with ideas greater than ourselves, or a refuge from the stress and confusion of daily life, or a place where time is both meaningful and meaningless in the moment. Nature is the place where we reconnect with forces greater than ourselves, forces like love, and time, and caring.
Cleveland Metroparks is a gift from the past, handed down with care to all of us by four generations of stewards who loved the land and the creatures that lived there, and knew that what they loved would be important to future generations as well. They were the giants of their day.
Today, we must be the giants. The gift has been passed to us. The challenge echoes down through the forests and glens of Cleveland Metroparks, and spills out into the lands and homes surrounding them, and outward from there. What will we do with the magnificent gifts we’ve been handed? Can the living gift of caring and loving and investing time and energy in the land spill outward from this great park district into the hearts and minds of those around it?
Can the call of stewardship lead us out beyond the mindlessness of shopping malls as social centers into lives built around not just caring, but into action as well?
Wordsworth reminds us that nature never did betray the heart that loved her, but it is time to ensure that we do not allow nature to be betrayed by our indifference. The battle for sustainable lifetimes may be won in the halls of legislatures, but it begins in the desires of the human heart. The future begins with you and me.
As the New Year begins, let’s make the gifts of love and time and caring flow outward through each of us. We will be the change we want to see in the world.
Reprinted with permission from the December 2006 Cleveland Metroparks newsletter.
