Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Getting Unplugged and Back in the Child's Realm

The Kaiser Family Foundation  reports that American children's use of iPods and MP3 players and other electronic media has increased more than an hour in the last five years. Today a child will spend over 7 hours plugged-in.  (Children's Media Use, By Platform - Kaiser Slides) Solution? Connect back to nature as Bailey confesses in this poem, where even the grand Dean of Cornell was snubbed by a child enthralled in their timeless world.

CHILD'S REALM


A little child sat on the sloping strand
Gazing at the flow and the free,
Thrusting its feet into the golden sand,
Playing with the waves and the sea.

I snatched a weed that was tossed on the flood
And unravelled its tangled skeins;
And I traced the course of the fertile blood
That lay deep in its meshed veins;

I told how the stars are garnered in space,
How the moon on its course is rolled;
How the earth is hung in its ceaseless place
As it whirls in its orbit old.
The little child paused with its busy hands
And gazed for a moment at me,
Then it dropped again to its golden sands
And played with the waves and the sea.

L.H. Bailey, Wind and Weather

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