A story of smallness and light discovering detail in the woods

A Story of Smallness and Light

Discovering detail in the woods

Deb Wilenski

A Story of Smallness and Light is the second booklet in a series, published by Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination (CCI), which begIns with 37 Shadows: Listening to children’s stories from the woods. It documents a particular fascination that developed during a ten week project in Bramblefields Nature Reserve, north Cambridge, in summer 2012. CCI creative practitioners Filipa Pereira Stubbs and Deb Wilenski worked with a class of four- and fiveyear-olds from Shirley Primary School, their teacher Jane Taylor and her colleagues Julie Chambers and Anita Kozicz. We spent each Monday morning in Bramblefields, and returned to school in the afternoon to continue our explorations.

There were, of course, many other fascinations during the project – the reserve quickly became a place of many places. But this story, which begins with Keira’s love of small things, is a remarkable response to our invitation to explore freely. It expresses beautifully the freedom to stay still, and the freedom to look for longer.

discover (verb)

1. find unexpectedly or during a search 2. divulge (a secret)

synonyms: find, locate, come across, chance upon, light on, bring to light (Oxford Dictionaries)

With thanks to the children who joined us in Bramblefields: Dihak, Julius, Amelka, Ilianna, Lewis, Nabil, Maha, Hayden, Kexin, Leo, Tyler, Kiemute, Devon, Katie, Elliott, Jensen, David, Tommy, Szymon, Margherita, Charlie, Wiktor, Alfie, Oliwia, Keira, Maisie

Meeting the wild

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Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination has worked for more than ten years in the wild outdoors with young children, their families and educators. We have come to understand wildness as a quality of spaces that can vary hugely in scale, from the sweeping expanses of country parks, to the spiky undergrowth of tiny nature reserves, from the unpredictable wetlands of a reclaimed brickworks, to the quiet under-tree worlds of a Victorian city cemetery.

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Our wild places are not wilderness, but we choose them because they feel wild – rich, unpredictable, full of unknown possibility.

But wildness also depends on how we are allowed to meet a place. In our projects we offer children two important freedoms: enough time and space to explore with physical daring and autonomy, and an invitation to use all their powers of curiosity, interpretation and creativity to make meaning from their explorations.

We know that wildness can offer young children adventure, freedom, encounters with danger, and heroic narratives; we have seen children’s powers of imagination and expression grow to meet the scale of what are, especially to them, such big wild worlds. But within the drama of wildness there are smaller worlds, and in almost

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every project children have been determined to find them. Quietly, with concentration and focus, through stillness and searching attention, they have found the fine detail of the natural world, been amazed by its existence, and returned to meet it week after week.

So this is a different kind of story from others we have documented. It begins in one patch of the woods and doesn’t travel far. It looks down to the ground and stays focused there for a long time, seeming to repeat itself many times. It is a story of smallness and delicate detail, and although it begins with one child’s way of seeing, it takes us all somewhere unexpected.

It is story of smallness that is far from slight.

Seeing small

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On her first visit to the woods Keira noticed and picked up tiny seeds, petals and flowers, using the split shells of slightly bigger seeds to keep them safe. Her search was quiet, gradual, and calm. When she found the next tiny flower or seed, she just looked up and smiled or said look at this one and continued searching.

Each new find was amazing, and no less so for being similar to the previous one.

Keira was quiet, but not shy or reluctant to go and find adventure. Her adventure lay in exactly this – the continuous search for tiny, beautiful things. Looking back at the photographs, even the way Keira held her treasures was remarkable; light but precise, her thumb and middle finger

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meeting softly, her index finger curled neatly out of the way.

One person’s quiet concentration can be magnetic. By the third week, a small group of girls started to gather around Keira, intrigued to see what she was finding. They began to look for seeds and flowers of their own, and though the calmness of Keira’s search was interrupted for a while, as the girls spent more time searching and becoming absorbed in looking, the quietness returned. Amelka was there, Kexin and Kiemute, Cherish, and Iliana. Though they searched side by side, each girl’s l o o k ing revealed something different. Keira still liked to find the tiniest smooth seeds and single flowers; Amelka was delighted to discover insects as well as flowers, and seemed

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fascinated by their movements and colours; Kiemute and Iliana loved the petals of wild roses that, in falling to the ground, had separated into perfect pink hearts.

Moving out into the meadow the girls became more and more fascinated by flowers. Beauty and detail were still important but the openness of the meadow made the scale of their explorations much larger.

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They found ways through the long grasses, and started to collect different kinds of flowers as they discovered them. They talked about the names the flowers might have, and in their conversation Keira’s characteristic precision returned, this time in the way she looked at and then named the flowers – crystals, bluebells, sunflowers, I think my mum calls these pinkies, blossom flowers, these are April flowers. The girls wanted to put the flowers in their hair, to wear them and keep them, take them back for their families and for the classroom.

Space for smallness

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The bunches of flowers survived, but in the classroom Keira’s tiny things were quickly lost in the busy bright space. She had brought back two of her smallest seed cases from the woods with even tinier seeds and flowers inside. By the afternoon one was already empty and had been knocked to the floor.

How could Keira’s persistent but delicate fascination with smallness survive and grow in school? Where was there space, not only in the physical environment, but in the values of the classroom for such quiet, calm and repeated exploration to flourish? What might we try changing through this project to make it more likely that such a fascination could deepen in school as well as having its place in the woods?

Our projects are not just about going outside and spending time in natural environments. The idea of the connected classroom is central – we want

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to find ways for the qualities, questions and powers that come alive in the children in the woods, to drive their enquiries and creative expression back at school. And transformational change is not just for children. Wild places provide a wonderfully provocative context for adults too; away from the conventions of the classroom, educators can explore and reflect on educational values and practice, expectations and relationships.

More and less

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We began our project in Bramblefields by meeting as a group of creative practitioners and educators to explore some of these questions. We took time to exchange ideas about wild places and why we go there.

We based our conversations around a game of cards, using images from many kinds of woods – real, imagined, extraordinary, familiar – to provoke thoughts, memories, and questions, to articulate our hopes and fears for this new project.

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The decision to take a class of children to the woods is often explained in terms of greater freedoms and the transformations these can bring, and is frequently expressed in what I have come to think of as a language of ‘more’. More physical freedom, more autonomy in decision making, more opportunities to see more sides of each child.

Jane, for example, looked forward to developments in the children’s powers of communication and corresponding increases in the educators’ understanding: I’m hoping that we’ll gain a deeper knowledge of the children, of the things they like, of their understanding of things, their creativity, their imagination. I’m hoping that they will speak one hundred times more outside than they do inside, and have more freedom to express themselves.

Julie described how the freedom she had had as a child was so much more than many of the

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children in her class now, and connected more freedom with more confidence: I can remember as a child playing in the woods and it being one of the nicest times, with friends, with brothers and sisters, having that freedom that was confidence-building basically. We used to go off, climb trees, run into big open spaces, investigate what was there.

There were many examples of big exploration, dramatic discovery and transformation in this project, exactly as Jane had anticipated and Julie remembered; but Keira’s exploration of tiny worlds needed a different kind of understanding and appreciation. We had to learn to look as Keira looked – at less, in order to see more.

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Writing this now I am struck by how seldom we voice our hopes and educational values in terms of ‘less’. It might seem absurd to say we hope children will speak less, move less, be less social, less dramatically expressive and less readable. And yet there are aspects of all these ‘lessenings’ in Keira’s absorbed search for tiny beauty. It isn’t vocal, it isn’t obviously dramatic, it could easily be overlooked. But her searching speaks volumes, not only about who Keira is and how she learns, but how others are drawn to learn around her.

Similarity and difference

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Amelka was one of the girls who was fascinated by the small things Keira found. She had a similar sense of fine detail and delight in discovering it, but there was an interesting difference too. Amelka was captivated by the tiny animated life of the woods and the meadow – the beetles, butterflies, snails, how they moved, their secret lives – and her observations often also included imaginings and narratives.

She was looking one week at a patch of tiny pink flowers in the woods:

You can’t whisper near here because the fairies live in here. They have colours but we don’t see the colours, we just see the black. They are really, really small. Do you know ladybirds is friends for the fairies?

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Amelka’s fascination for smallness included even the invisible life of the woods. It made perfect sense that tiny creatures like ladybirds and semivisible fairies would know each other. There was in Amelka’s discovery of tiny things a promise of magic and extraordinary possibility that was different from Keira’s sense of aesthetics and pattern. Amelka once spotted the furry seed head of a new grass in the meadow, and talked as if it might be a wild animal or a person: It’s the baby one, it’s very lovely. Does it like the green?

She was delighted when her own hands transformed too, after she had been swinging from the branch of a tree, turning the same green as the bark and smelling green and delicious.

I asked Amelka if she wanted to find some tiny colourful things for the fairies, as she had already begun a collection that morning. We went on an amazing journey through the woods which seemed utterly different when the way was decided by the tiny points of new colour Amelka was collecting: a piece of lime green lichen, an ivy leaf black as wet wood, a curious blue-green piece of machinery, a pink flower opening from a soft silver stem.

The collection of colours seemed alive too. As Amelka found the right place for them near the fairies’ flowers, she insisted protectively: we have to put them somewhere where they are never never going to get wet.

Constructing spaces

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Back in the classroom, where the tiny seeds and flowers had been lost, Keira developed her own solution for keeping small things safe. Most children had used the simple resources of paper, pencils and markers to draw or to make books. Keira began by making her book of the woods too – the pages showing a girl finding flowers, the climbing tree, her sister coming to the woods, a clear and shapely alphabet, and two phrases: flowers are nice and the climbing tree.

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But she then used the paper to construct in three dimensions, with glue and tape to secure folds and joinings. Keira used her empty seed case for decoration, and added green beech leaves from the garden. The full seed case with its tiny flowers fitted inside, and was joined, as the afternoon progressed, by Keira’s drawing of herself, and finally by a yellow feather, used as a sail, as the whole structure became a boat. This image of ‘Keira in the boat’ seemed to encapsulate so well the sense I had of her travelling in the woods by staying sometimes in one small space.

Travelling by staying still, but in her stillness going a long way.

In the woods we created protective spaces too.

Filipa showed a way of folding tiny envelopes from paper that could hold petals and seeds, and Keira and Kexin quickly adopted this way of carrying their collections, making the envelopes themselves. Julie sewed beautiful cloth shoulder bags for collecting, and for carrying the homemade books we also now offered in the woods, as storying had become an important part of the

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children’s experience there. Boys and girls both valued these and it became far easier for words and treasures to come back from the woods without being lost on the way or in the classroom.

Of course, in valuing and noticing smallness and delicate fascinations, our attention was also a kind of protection. We noticed, remembered, connected and shared our observations, and so even small scale explorations were given stature and recognition, and could grow over the weeks.

They became more visible too through documentation in a new space made in the classroom for our project, with calm clear walls, long low shelves, and small framing spaces.

Smallness, secret places, and what matters most

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All these enclosing and protective spaces seemed to be connected to another widespread investigation of smallness, beauty, and place. Ever since our first week in the woods children had discovered and named spaces they called their secret gardens. These were usually located on the quiet margins of the woods, sometimes through brambles and thick undergrowth, and were small, intimate places, often too small for grown-ups to get into easily.

Though some children wanted to show us their secret gardens, there was also the sense of ownership that Julie had described in her childhood explorations: no adults to show me anything – we were there, looking, seeing, finding, investigating. In these spaces we saw children literally settling into the woods; stopping, sitting, lying in their special places, with no sense of

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restlessness or hurry. In the trees too, some children found spaces they didn’t want to leave, adapting their bodies to the shapes of the branches. Tyler tried many times to climb his tree and when he managed at last he told Filipa: I’m going to stay here forever. We sometimes invited children to end our session in school by closing their eyes and ‘seeing’ the woods again – the secret gardens were frequently the place to which children returned: Nabil: I found loads of secret gardens and they were so nice, and everyone saw my different gardens.

Kiemute: A secret place that no-one knows, which Nabil knows where it is.

Maha: It was a secret garden and I found a little golden stone.

Tyler: A flower garden.

Wiktor: I remember super garden.

Nabil’s gardens

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Nabil began to talk about secret gardens at the end of our very first visit, and his gardens, like Keira’s shell cases, were spaces that could hold the things he loved and wanted to protect: A flower secret bonny rose garden. It had rabbits and hamsters, and a baby bear and a hen, and it hugged me and gave me a kiss. And there was also a little friendly tiger and a little friendly lion, a friendly snake, and a friendly bird and cat and a guinea pig.

Keira collected beauty and tininess in her secret gardens, Nabil found and kept flowers, friendship, and affection in his, and creatures of all kinds. The secret places showed us what mattered most, and expressed what was on the inside of the children too – a capacity for connection and a wish for friendliness in Nabil who was sometimes on the peripheries of play trying to find a way in.

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I didn’t often see Nabil and Keira together, but one morning they came across each other near one of Nabil’s secret gardens. Keira was finding small sticks with patterns on, and using them as keys to get into places in the undergrowth; Nabil immediately understood her idea and showed her a way through to his garden. When they came through he said: Today I’m working, I’m going to go inside and eat some tea. I’ve got your tea. You like little birds don’t you Keira. If it goes out in the sky it won’t come, but here it goes all around my secret garden.

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Collecting and composing

It was an invitation which recognised Keira’s love of little things, and made a clear connection between a secret place, a small bird, and someone who might stay for long enough to appreciate both.

Keira made collections right through the ten weeks. Seeds, flowers, small sticks and leaves were as important at the end of the project as they had been in the beginning, but there seemed to be a growing sophistication in how the tiny things were brought into relation with one another. In the last few weeks, when composing seemed an important expression of Keira’s collecting, she used stone platforms to bring her patterns into view.

Creating pattern, order and relationship is fascinating. Everyone does it differently. Though many of us had spent time alongside Keira and

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exchanged our observations, it was still impossible to predict the subtle interplay of size, shape, texture, colour, weight, and balance in her compositions. They were made slowly and carefully, sometimes adjusted, with pieces added or removed. They were lightly present, placed in the undergrowth deep in the woods.

They were quietly, glowingly beautiful.

Looking again - a story of order

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It was only when I began to document Keira’s story of smallness that two more astonishing narratives began to appear. We had already seen how Keira’s interest in tiny detail was partly driven by the big ideas of pattern, composition, wholeness, and beauty.

It was also about protection – she had joined the group who had found and made nests in the woods and then drawn tiny baby birds to live in them.

But there had always seemed something else in Keira’s fascination with smallness, and I was still trying to understand what this could be.

Re-visiting notes and photographs, I began to realise how much order and pattern had been present from the beginning in the way Keira expressed herself in spoken language. Here she is talking about one of her own secret gardens:

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I’ve got lots of leaves in here. I’ve got three ladybirds in my garden. Two. One is yellow and one is red. I’ve got a butterfly. It’s got circles on both wings and two lines. I have five leaves. I’m going to be six soon.

Precision, detail, balance, progression. All the qualities that characterised the way Keira collected seemed to be present here in her words.

Collecting is of course partly a re-ordering of the world – not only seeing the order in the world but creating it by making new relationships and designs. Towards the end of the project I brought in a book from the V&A’s Pattern Source Book series, in which flowers and other plants had been used as the basis for textile designs.

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A number of the children were fascinated by it – Keira, especially, and Amelka, but also Charlie and Elliott. They looked at each pattern, discussed the colours, traced lines with their fingers.

I also offered a collection of tiny things of my own – minute but perfect shells from a Northumbrian beach. The tiny shells met Keira’s tiny collection from the woods, and after she had spent a long time arranging and making places for them – including a bed for the smallest – I asked what the small things would say to each other. Keira answered: You’re small. You’re very big. You’re medium.

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On our final afternoon in the woods, as we met to celebrate the project with the children’s families, Keira made one last composition which expressed her sense of pattern and order in a new and remarkable way.

I realised suddenly what her investigations had reminded me of: the pioneering, meticulous, and quietly dramatic work of early botanists and explorers, many of them female; without the possibility of photography, they had noticed, painted, drawn, and finally created a system for classifying the beautifully detailed plant life of newly explored worlds.

A story of light

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Keira’s ongoing narrative of order and beauty also took in the lucent qualities of the woods. Her secret gardens were located on the edges of the woods in threshold spaces where there was a striking contrast between the rich darkness of the woods, small areas of dappled light and the bright outside light of the meadows. Keira called the places where the light came through her windows.

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It was only when I looked again at a sequence of photographs taken one morning as Keira showed me all her secret gardens, that I realised each one included one of these framed windows of glowing light. An image of Keira collecting in her garden showed that she had positioned herself too in a patch of light circled by shaded undergrowth. And her composition on the stone had begun in shadow, but then been re-positioned so that the middle of it was lit by a patch of sunlight falling through the trees.

Keira’s fascination for shape, structure and beauty was expressed in this quiet architectural journey between secret, magical places of illumination. And we only saw it at all by looking again, and looking for longer; by staying still and noticing where we were.

Exploring big and small

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‌many aspects of the children’s days are little enough; but how often the whole course of our subsequent history becomes an attempt to regain this sorcery, this power of finding the infinitely great in the materially small!

John Cowper Powys (writer) Autobiography, 1934

Wild worlds can be immense, and wild worlds can be tiny. Most extraordinary of all, they can be both at the same time. During this project I remember having to re-adjust my focus frequently, between worlds of different scale.

After spending a long time with Keira or Amelka my eyes would keep seeing small, searching out fine detail, noticing specks of colour on the woodland floor. When I looked up at last, the woods grew huge in front of me, each tree tall as a tower, the sky lifting impossibly high. It took a

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while for the world to settle back to its usual size, and made size itself feel relative. There were huge worlds inside tiny detail, and there were ways to make all but the tiniest of details disappear.

Keira didn’t spend all her time exploring smallness. Like many children she ran, climbed trees, chased friends through the meadow, and found a wider world to explore. But she had a love of the small scale that was constant and remarkable. Her quiet concentration drew others in, revealed worlds we didn’t know were there, and made unanticipated discoveries - in all senses of this intriguing word; discover (verb): find unexpectedly or during a search, divulge (a secret), locate, come across, chance upon, bring to light.

Charlie writes the story of smallness

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One final discovery, perhaps the most surprising of all, was that Keira’s fascination for smallness had been noticed and understood all along, by someone who appeared to be interested only in huge adventuring. Charlie was a boy for whom the world was barely big or bold enough. He was fast, strong, dramatic, sometimes overwhelming the games he joined, but full of powerful ideas and quick humour. On our last visit to the woods together I was sitting near Keira who had made a collection in a small wooden bowl, this time including a tiny snail.

The snail was barely noticeable from close up, and certainly impossible to see from a distance. Charlie came racing up the path nearby, with a group of boys who were pursuing zombie enemies. They flew past, but Charlie stopped and doubled back. He looked at Keira’s collection, took a piece of

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paper from a notebook nearby, and wrote two sentences, putting them in the wooden bowl before charging off again. They were stories of smallness that not only comprehended Keira’s fascination, they even sounded like the stories Keira told – precise, sufficient, with nothing unneccesary, and everything that needed to be there.

It is very little One little snail.

With thanks to: Mary Jane Drummond and Ruth Sapsed for meticulous editing and beautiful attention to detail.

The supporting staff from Shirley Primary School and parent volunteers who accompanied us in the woods.

Cambridge City Council, who manage this local nature reserve, for keeping Bramblefields big enough for adventuring and small enough for discovery.

How we got here: CCI’s Footprints programme supports communities to play, learn and work together throughout the year in their local wild spaces. Cambridgeshire County Council Early years Service commissioned us to run a supported project with Shirley Primary School through the summer of 2012 led by Filipa Pereira Stubbs and Deb Wilenski.

More information about the work of CCI and our practice is at www.cambridgecandi.org.uk.

CCI is a registered charity (no. 1126253) Design by Susanne Jasilek Photographs by Deb Wilenski Š Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without prior written authorization.

ISBN 978-0-9926259-1-7

I used to think greatness of scale an important aspect of wildness. Recently, I have learned to change my focus.

The thing that really altered the way I see was the arrival of my children: they have taught me that wildness is not a function of scale – landscapes can be miniaturised and remain astonishing – that the world flexes on its borders, is porous at its boundaries, and that wonder is a unique and vital survival skill.

Robert Macfarlane, author, speaking at the launch of CCI’s Fantastical Guide - Ways into Hinchingbrooke Country Park

Published by Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination