March 16, 2024

Quote of the Week

"Remember the earth whose skin you are: red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth brown earth, we are earth. Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems." -- Joy Harjo

Finding Our Way: The Science Of Wayfinding

By Sarah Boon

Explore this perspective-shifting article on way-finding with environmental clues:

“...we are not self-contained individuals confronting a world out there, but developing organisms in an environment, enmeshed in tangled relationships. As we move through space, our knowledge undergoes continuous formulation. Wayfinding isn’t knowing before we go, but, as he put it, ‘knowing as we go..." - Tim Ingold

Deep within, we have an instinctual capability to find our ways, when we get lost on the road or a building or when we find ourselves in a entirely landmark-free zones. Many indigenous wisdom keepers and Aboriginal communities, that originally practiced the art of 'way-finding' continue to rear families with this core tenet. They also nurture these skills in young ones; see more examples in this article and the featured book in the next section. Unconventional to the routinized functioning of contemporary worlds we inhabit, the article advocates getting lost on purpose as a practice of coupling our movement and perception of surrounding contexts. The idea is to hear the materials around us speak their memories, albeit in non-verbal cues.

“Maybe the metaphor at the heart of navigation is not following a map but listening and intuiting the progress of a piece of music” - M.R. O’Connor

Reading Corner

Title: Songlines: First Knowledges for Younger Readers
By: Margo Neale, Lynne Kelly, Blak Douglas (illus.)
Ages: 8+

"Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly show their young readers how Songlines have helped the First Peoples of Australia share valuable knowledge across the land and through time, especially before British colonizers migrated to this continent. They begin with explaining what Songlines are. Songlines are an ancient internet – a superhighway of knowledge and entertainment. Songlines helped people know which food was safe to eat, they tell stories of volcanoes and star constellations, and of the Olympics. Songlines are not just ways of recording the past, they also make it possible to tell the future all the important things to know about the present. It’s a lot of information to pass on." -- A reviewer at Readings

Find the book here.

Bonus for caretakers, teachers and parents (or even elder siblings!): Try reading the 1987 book with similar name and thematic idea, The Songlines by Bruce Chadwin. Enjoy!

Be the Change

Invite children to try walking with their eyes closed in a park or any other open space. Alternatively you all could plug ears to suspend environmental sounds. Discuss your interpretations of this exercise. On suspending one sensory mode, which other doors opened for you? How did each participant decide when to keep moving, stop or turn?