What Listening to the Land Teaches a Child

What Listening to the Land Teaches a Child | A Reflection

There is a moment, soft, almost unseen, when a child steps into the living world and something ancient stirs around them.

A shift in the air.
A quiet leaning of branch and shadow.
A sense, deep in the body, that the land has recognised them, and they, without words, have remembered how to listen.

Not with words, or  with anything the mind could hold.
But with a slight shift in the air,
a hush in the branches,
a widening in the quiet beneath their feet.

Children feel this before we do.

Before language, before expectation,
before the world teaches them to be louder than their own breath,
and they know how to listen.

They know how to pause
and turn their face to the wind
as if greeting an old friend.

They know how to place their hand on a stone
and wait, without rushing,
for whatever is ancient inside it
to settle around their palm.

Listening is their first language.
The land remembers this.

When a child listens to the land,
they are not learning,
but remembering something old.

A way of being that lives beneath thought.
A belonging that does not need proof.
A knowing that does not require instruction.

The land reminds them gently:

That stillness is not empty.
That silence has shape.
That the world is speaking all the time
if we soften enough to hear it.

Sometimes you will see it happen; that quiet shift in a child’s body
when the forest leans closer.

Their shoulders loosen.
Their eyes widen not in excitement,
but in recognition.
Their breath changes, synchronises,
finds a deeper rhythm.

It is as though the child and the land
remember each other at the same time.

And in that moment,
something inside them anchors,
softly, without effort,
to the world beneath their feet.

As adults, we spend years trying to return to this way of listening.
Children never left it.

They carry it like a small lantern inside them,
glowing quietly,
waiting for the places where its light
is fully seen.

All we can do, 
all we ever needed to do,
is create the space for it to stay alive.

Because when a child listens to the land,
the land listens back.
And in that meeting,
belonging blossoms without sound.

These moments become the stories we hold, as I wrote in A Mother’s Role as Story Keeper

More ways to wander with us 

You may like the companion post Children and the Living World

Or wander into the journey with us here