The River of Life

Forest and Bird, Issue 76, 1 May 1945, Page 5

The River of Life

By “AOTEAROA”

Who is for Purity and Who for Defilement ?

LITTLE girls and boys start life as little streams and creeks and clear springs start life. * The springs and little creeks, are dear, clear as crystal, because, at their start, there is nothing to muddy them. A little boy sees himself sees his reflection —in the quiet spring or in the musical creek that flows from the spring. Creek and boy see each other face to face. They have nothing to hide from each other. The creek and the boy are not old enough to be false or deceitful. They do not know what is ahead of them in the future, but they are full of hope. The creek reflects the boy’s likeness just as it is, without lie and without flattery. Everything is honest between them. Also, everything is beautiful.

What is beauty? Perhaps a little boy (or girl) may not understand beauty with his mind, and may not be able to put beauty into words; but even in infancy he feels it. The silver and green, the silvery flash of the limpid water running over or round the stones of rapids and the green of the native bush overhanging, are seen and heard and felt by the little boy. He cannot write words of praise, but all that they mean, and more, are known to his inner self. If he did not have these deep feelings, why should the boy be drawn to the creek-side? Any day, anywhere, one can see how running water fascinates children. What does this fascination —such a big word!—mean? It means that the child, girl or boy, loves to be near that silvery, tinkling thing, the creek; and, in fact, can hardly keep away. Without knowing why, children seek the company of things or persons that are pleasant to them. Like attracts like. Child and little stream are young, preparing for a long journey. They have not lost their clarity, that is, their transparent clearness. Children’s impressions are sensed; that is to say, they learn through their senses, through their eyes, ears, and nose.

Later in life, by labour of the mind, children may add to what, they feel by knowing some of the reasons for those feelings. The wonder-

ful fragrance of the gorge they may trace to a New Zealand orchid that flowers on trees or rocks overhanging the stream, and the smell of the orchid gives delight. Then some older person may tell the child the name of the orchid, and the names of other New Zealand orchids, and may explain how our orchids show that long ago New Zealand had a hotter climate. Our orchids, now separated from their richer and more colourful orchid-cousins in the warm north, fight a never-ending rearguard battle against the cold south. But all of these things learned later in life are ahead of the story on which we started the story of the child and the streamlet preparing, almost like twin beings, for their long journey in those young days when beauty was not stated in big words, but yet was felt.

When the creek said goodbye to the children and wandered off downhill it began to lose its plant and tree companions. The bush that it entered did not remain the same on its downward journey. This high country bush, consisting largely of trees which the bushmen call birch and which the professors call beech, was not the kind of bush that sawmillers prefer to use. But it was roamed over by, and the trees and small growths were damaged by, bushline farmers’ wandering cattle and by deer brought years ago from Europe; also by fires lighted by careless people who think that bush is made to be burned, and who are sometimes correctly called vandals. As the creek flowed on, downward and downward and bigger and bigger ,as other creeks joined it, it entered the country where sawmillers had cut and removed what they deemed best in the bush, and vandals burned what was left. Released from the roots of the dead trees, and washed by the unchecked rains, the earth of the hillsides fell into the creek, which, dammed up, became a temporary lake and in floodtime washed the earth of the hillsides down on to the farmers’ plains, where farms were ruined. Thus, in fifteen or fifty miles of downhill running, the stream, now river, learned by muddy experience that life

itself is too often downhill; that while water is compelled by its very nature to run down, men and women, who, if they choose, can shape an uphill course to better things, too often prefer to drift downward, allowing soil, farm, and their own comfort and prosperity to perish in the drift. The stream, now a discoloured river, was shocked to find that men can be so unjust to themselves and to those who come after them. Men might have protected the upland forest and the vegetation of the waterside from browsing animals, from fire, from steel, from all enemies, and might have preserved the river as it used to be—a greater creek running between fixed green banks, a friend of man and of farm cattle. But the spirit of indifference in man and the growing spirit of the vandal have altered much of New Zealand from the green state in which the white man found it to a state of big yellow scars (which mark landslips on the hills) and flood-damaged plains below the scars, accompanied with a flood of advice from people employed by the Government but not many people listening to them, and nothing done to stop the crimes of man against the forest and the stream.

Gathered on the high mountains in their transparent spring-like beginnings, these waters

that are sinned against by man’s neglect of the hillsides have learned by experience how easy it is for either man or water to fall to a lower plane of living and to become muddy, unsightly, and destructive, sacrificing beauty and utility to grossness, and discolouring for ever the crystal beginnings from which life springs, and from which it voyages forth on the seas of unenlightened and unguided experience.

Seeing that the creek on the mountain side and the human boy or girl make the same fair start, what can mar them? What can destroy their crystalline purity? The evil comes from had stewardship. The stewards who should protect the stream and the forest are the people of New Zealand, one and ail. But the stewardship of the child is vested in, first, the parents; second, the school teachers; third, anyone who can claim to be a nature lover, and with whom a child comes in contact. The parable of the stream —its parallel with the river of human —may here merge with the parable of the sower who went forth to sow, and who later found tares as well as wheat.

The terrible increase of vandalismthe insane destruction of private and public property — children, adolescents, and adults whose minds have never grown up, is a direct challenge to the stewardship of the parent, the school teacher, and the community. Perhaps it is the teacher who has the greater power to teach children to love and respect in their adolescence that beauty which undoubtedly they feel in their wordless first impressions of life. The teacher can, if anyone can, prevent the growth of the —the development of violence towards natural and useful objects. Why should fifteen miles of a stream’s course, and fifteen years of a child’s life, introduce so much mud as to make unrecognisable their relationship to those beings who started out in infancy with a pure heritage of beauty and of being attracted to the beautiful? Do teachers and parents realise how easily the battle for a forest-conscience in New Zealand can be won or lost in the years of adolescence, from which emerge either a respecter of the beautiful unity of mountain, valley, and stream, or a vandal and a larrikin and a creature blind all his life to the basic beauty and utility which Nature, for use or abuse, abundantly provided? To-day, in any New Zealand panorama of undulating or steep country, one can see near

and far, for miles and miles, numberless yellow scars on the green or brown hills. Those scars mark not only the erosion of the countryside but the erosion of New Zealanders’ sense of responsibility. Parents, schools, press, and public all carry those same scars on their New Zealand souls, but are usually quite cheerful and careless about it. From where can the remedy come, if not first and foremost from the teachers? The natural affinity of youth and Nature has been charmingly sung by Goethe: Then, as I wander’d free, In every field, for me Its thousand flowers were blowing! A veil through which I did not see, A thin veil o’er the world was thrown, In every bud a mystery; Magic in everything unknown. * * * * Are not most of the higher values of human life comprehended in this sense of the mystery and magic of Nature? Who, having found it, would lose it? And he who realises the oneness of Nature, and his own place in that sacred unity, would as soon rob a tomb or desecrate a church as injure Nature’s wild children.