songs of experience

I often explain to people that the reason I can’t quit running is because I want to play outside every day … just like I did as a kid! I ran home from school, threw my stuff down, maybe ate some cheese toast (cooked under the broiler with butter) then bolted out the door to play in the neighborhood. I didn’t come back indoors until I heard my dad call, “Jeff, Julie, Joan, John … DINNER!!” I think this poem below, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (author of the famous Yellow Wallpaper), expresses the ageless desire to play outside.

Just To Be Out of Doors! So still! So green!
With unbreathed air, illimitable, clean,
With soft, sweet scent of happy growing things,
The leaves’ soft flutter, sound of sudden wings,
The far faint hills, the water wide between.

Breast of the great earth-mother! Here we lean
With no conventions hard to intervene,
Content, with the contentment nature brings,
Just to be out of doors.

And under all the feeling half foreseen
Of what this lovely world will come to mean
To all of us when the uncounted strings
Are keyed aright, and one clear music rings
In all our hearts. Joy universal, keen,
Just to be out of doors.

-Charlotte Perkins Gilman