'Know you what it is to be a child?' asked the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. 'It is to believe in the power of belief itself; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, and nothing into everything.' Most grown-ups who are busy earning a living, commuting and doing household chores have lost - or at the very least mislaid - the fascination and curiosity about their natural surroundings that they had as children.
To rekindle that sense of wonder, go for a walk in the park or along a beach with a small child. The first thing you will notice is that your pace will become slower: children can dawdle along for hours, looking at everything and nothing. They stop to squat down and poke a stick at a caterpillar or to pick up a feather, a leaf, a shell fragment or a rock with an interesting shape. Even if you both only walk to the end of your street and back, the child will see something wonderful - 'Look at that cat in the window!' - or find a new mystery in a winged seedpod or a dragonfly.
When you look at the world through a child's eyes, there are magical treasures everywhere. Trace the pattern of bark on a tree. Listen to a gutter full of leaves and gurgling brown water after a downpour. Lie flat on your back on the grass and watch the clouds overhead: see if you can make out shapes of a lion, a dragon, a letterbox. Turn a stone over with the toe of your shoe and watch the earwigs scuttle away. Hunker down and peer closer: put a crumb on the ground and wait and watch until an ant picks up that boulder of a crumb and hauls it away.
If you care about birds, beetles and flowers, you will always be able to tap into your childlike sense of wonder, and you will never have a boring or stressful day again, because even the tiniest experience can seem like a miracle.
What does the word 'beauty' mean to you? We are conditioned to define beauty as something that is perfect, lovely, stylish, but also often larger than life, impressive and glamorous. To appreciate the natural wonder in the world around you, it is necessary to look beyond this definition of beauty, and to notice the small and exquisite ordinary things that touch your heart.
A walk along a bush path or a creek bed can yield the most extraordinary collection of beautiful things - a piece of cuttlefish, a prickly seedcase, a piece of amber glass polished smooth by many years of being tossed and tumbled in the sea and sand, a bird's feather, tipped with electric blue.
Collecting these talismans and keeping them in a special treasure box is a way of focusing your senses so that you pause to look around you at the natural world, to listen and feel. It's also a link to childhood, and of days spent beachcombing and cubby-making, and when you would bring home a shell or rock to keep and look at more closely in the privacy of your room. Perhaps you already have a suitable box. If you don't, buy one from a craft shop and decorate it in a way that's meaningful to you.
Glue the shells, pebbles or stones all over the box and lid in a decorative pattern, leaving the area where the lid slides down onto the box free. Set the box aside until the glue dries, then paint it with clear varnish.
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