Ep 35 | Let’s Go Far…Together

If your job and mission is to also make the world a better place by supporting the lives of children, being more playful, supporting adults that support children, the whole thing. If you’re training, if you’re teaching, all of it, we can make the difference

Hi, this is Rusty Keeler, and you’re listening to the Play Nature Podcast where we talk about play, nature, playing in nature, and the nature of play. I’m glad you’re here. Let’s have a listen Hello Hello, dear listener Here we are back at Six Mile Creek in Ithaca, New York, and it is something like June 17th, the middle of June.

Did we just go past the middle of June? No. No, that can’t be. But I guess we have. My sons are out of school. It all happened so quickly. So I’m a little discombobulated with schedules and extra people in the house during the day, and, uh, what was I trying to get done? What was happening? What do, what do we gotta do?

Where are we going? Ah. But now I know exactly where we’re supposed to be. Right here. Right here by the creek, just you and me. And it is a lovely day in Ithaca. Not too hot, you know, almost the perfect temperature. Kinda cool, actually. And the creek is, you know, it’s got a nice amount of water in it, but I could easily walk across in my flip-flops.

And this is a creek that has lots of crayfish, so I’ve done lots of crayfish hunting with my sons over the years. We spent a lot of time here during the pandemic, just in the creek, as my older son became, like, a ninja cat- a, a crayfish-catching ninja. Yeah, that’s it. But, you know, so we start off the, the solo podcast when I’m at the creek just kind of tuning in.

Been doing a lot of talking and thinking about the speed of life that we are on and society is on, and culture and technology and social media and information and artificial intelligence, and I am lobbying for all of us to slow down All of us to slow down, and when we’re with children, to be able to create space to just slow down And I love the idea of Earth speed.

Yeah. Being on Earth speed. Not machine speed, not artificial intelligence speed, but Earth speed So coming to the creek here is like a way that we can kind of start to get on Earth speed and tune in, or a way that I like to. And it’s being with the water, and it’s kind of like mindfulness. And you can, you can be Earth speed even if you are in a machine.

But it’s, yeah, it’s like tuning in and mindfulness. And as I watch the water gently move past me from right to left, I see some little bugs, a hatch in the sunlight flying around, you know, experiencing their glory of being alive in this momentary, the momentary time they have, just like the momentary time we have.

And there’s butterflies flapping along, and the water is sparkling in the sunlight. It’s kind of nice here in Ithaca. We have nature that just goes right into the city, like of these fingers of nature poking into the city, but you can also hear city sounds. Sounds like there’s some road construction or dump trucks up there over the hill.

That’s all right. We’re here by the creek And so part of, you know, being by the creek at earth speed, uh, that’s, it’s tuning in and it’s also tuning in to one of the big messages that I put out on my recent four city spring speaking tour. That’s right. Yes. Yeah. I just had an amazing experience over the last few weeks here, kind of going in and out of Ithaca to visit some amazing folks doing amazing things to support rich, beautiful outdoor play for the children they work with or the children that they care for, their own kids.

And so yeah, yes, I, I went to four places. I was sort of… My son has been listening to a lot of Counting Crows and there’s a song about Middle America, and so I was thinking about this as my Middle America tour because I went to Illinois, Wisconsin. Oh, there’s a merganser duck just flew by, my dad’s favorite kind of duck.

So Illinois, Wisconsin, Alabama, I don’t know if you call that Middle America, but uh, south, south middle, and Oklahoma. And yes, it was, it was great. So I thought today in the podcast I would, yeah, just tell you some stories about that experience of going out into the world, you know, um My spirit animal is a red newt.

If you know those little creatures, they’re like a salamander. They’re one of the stages of a, of a certain kind of salamander that lives here in Upstate New York, and you don’t see them that often. But when you do, you’re, you’re pretty happy, and they’re, they’re pretty sweet. And, you know, they don’t look like they’re gonna hurt anybody.

And yeah, people kinda warm up to ’em, but you don’t see them that often. But also on a deeper level, th-there’s an idea that they are either of the water and of the land, but they’re also bringing the fire. They are this, they are this bright red, almost fluorescent color, like very surprising to see in the woods, and you don’t see them that often, but certain times they come out.

And so they… This idea that they bring the fire, well, I can relate to a lot of that with that, with the red newt, because out in the world, maybe you don’t see me that often. But every once in a while, I come out, and I try to spread my goodness and be a positive, you know, thing that people look up, look forward to.

Uh, and just like y- I look forward to seeing a red newt in the wild. But also, on a deeper level, I feel like I’m trying to bring the fire. I’m trying to bring the fire to all of you and to you and to, to everybody out there, and the fire is kind of the deeper way that we can approach supporting children and supporting play and strengthening our communities and making the world a better place that way.

You know, using the fire that we have within us to create the world that we want. Yeah, we can do it The algorithms might not do it. They might not show us, you know, the things that are gonna help us make our lives better. But when we turn that stuff off, we can do things in the world that no algorithm can hand us on social media.

We can wa– make our neighborhoods nicer places. We can be good neighbors. We can do good things for our community, and we can do good things for our children. So that’s the fire. That’s the… I guess that, in some ways, that’s the fire that burns for me that I wanna bring out into the world. And I felt like I was successful in that endeavor, that mission.

I try to have, like, a vision of success before I go out, um, on these trips. And, uh, I guess for me, the vision of success is to be able to do my best job, like getting the message through, being a clear vessel, uh, being a loving presence, being supportive. And for me, the vision of success is if people in my audience, they go away looking excited and inspired and empowered and feeling like, yeah, they can do it.

They can dream big but not get intimidated by the big dreams because they, they can also start small. You know, and that’s over and over. That’s what I’m, I’m pushing. I’m a pusher of doing the smallest thing that you can to make a, to make a change in the positive direction. The smallest, easiest thing that you can do And then do another, and then do another, and then do another, and then do another.

So that’s the secret, right? That’s the whole dream big, start small, never stop. So what I did was I went out to… Each experience was a little bit different. So I’ll just tell you a little bit about the venues and, and the discussions, and I’ll give you a little behind the curtain of how, how I prepare for these kinds of things.

Uh, and yeah, just, just some different, different things that came out of it because… So w- it wasn’t, it wasn’t just me blabbing and blathering along. Uh, I, you know, I did some of that. You know, I had s- my moments of doing the keynote and speaking, but was also very, very powerful and certainly for s- some of them, the thing that I enjoyed the most or that I, that I got the most out of, or I thought that was the deepest ex- experience, was a risky play roundtable.

So I do the talks, the keynotes, and that’s fun, and, you know, information’s coming through me and out to people. Uh, but then w- we circle up and have a risky play roundtable to really talk about it, and that’s when, you know, we pass the microphones around and people share their relation to risk. I have people kind of reflect on, “Well, what is your relation to r- risk, one to five?”

You can, you can think about that right now if you want. Uh, and then both working with children one to five, and then also, like, what they’re… in their own life, what is their relation to risk? And then we talk about it. We get into all sorts of great things, successes, challenges, you know, concerns. And, you know, we talk about, talk about it all.

I hear ama- you know, amazing successes, people doing, you know, uh, watching children and not saying no, and then seeing amazing things happen, or being self-reflective of when they said no and when they wish they said yes, or when they said yes and they wish they would have said no. But also talking about licensing Having to deal with licensing, the fear of licensing.

You know, what holds you back, what holds people back? Also parents talking to parents. You know, if you’re early childhood educator or childcare provider, you know, parents are a part of the factor. If you’re a parent, maybe talk to your other parent and how they feel about risky play. Anyway, the risky play roundtable is beautiful.

And then we also did fairy hut building, and that was nice. We did some, a couple places were inside. One place was inside, couple, couple had inside or outside, but we also did them outside in the woods, which was really awesome. And so, but I started that just like we start the podcast here on Earthspeed by the Creek.

I led people in a slow, silent walk through the woods to just tap into their senses, Earthspeed, and feel the woods, hear the woods, see the woods, and then we’d come back and circle up Talk about what we felt, what the experience was like, and yeah, then we go play. Then we build fairy huts. And educators dive right into it.

Maybe I’ll put a link to some of the… I have a, uh, online, like, a picture board so you can see some of the fairy huts that educators did. And of course, totally creative, highly imaginative, some humorous, some extravagant, and no two the same. So lots of fun there. So I first went to, like, a… Let’s see. Well, you know what?

I based it on that, if you listen to my podcast a few podcasts ago, my new play manifesto, and that’s kind of the earth speed. I’ve talked about earth speed. But I also talked about, this is kind of going out there in the world now, is what I’m picking up on and what I’m really feeling is that a change is happening.

It’s funny, c- you go to different places, and part of what, you know, in my talk, I, I ask people, like, “Does it feel like the world’s speeding up? Right?” And everybody’s like, “Yes, yes, yes.” But it was funny, when I drove to the first one, Moline in East Moline, Illinois, this is the west side of Illinois on the Mississippi River.

I stayed at a place right on the Mississippi River. Uh, but as I was driving from the airport to there, and I was in this small town, and it was like the pace was delightfully slow. There was, like, peop- kids on playgrounds. There was a Little League game going in, uh, going on in the park. There were signs for, like, you know, a community festival coming up.

There’s kids in front yards playing and, and I was thinking, “Oh, well, maybe the world is not speeding up here in East Moline, Illinois.” But of course, what we talk about in the Risky Play Roundtable and even in the keynote It’s that technology world that’s speeding up. It’s like everything that’s being pushed at you, social media and television and twenty-four-hour news and more technology and, you know, that fast-paced world.

So everybody does feel, even though maybe out, out, as I say, you, you put away the machine, and we’re living our life, right? Butterflies are f-flying, and birds are flying and water is moving in creeks. And, you know, I even felt like that during the pandemic was like, you know, for, for we humans, it was chaos.

And was the world coming to the end, coming to the end? At one, you know, various points, we thought it might be. But that was us. And, and what often brought me hope and grounding was just looking out the window or being outside and seeing, you know, even though it was chaos for the humans, oh, birds came back, their migratory roots, uh, in the springtime and, and spring and flowers and flower, you know, blooming in spring and leaves coming out and, you know, the cycles of nature, like nature is there.

The earth speed was still happening. And that’s, you know, so that’s this message about, yes, technology is, is picking up and even childhood and pushing down academics, you know, that’s try– it’s trying to speed things up. But our job can be slowing things down, creating that container, that safe container for children to be children, to have the time, the space, and the materials to play, to lead their own play, to explore, to bump into things, to bump into each other, to, you know, have the good, rich experiences that are, you know, real in the moment and that al- are also building their hearts, minds, body, spirits, nervous systems, ways of being, starting to build their prefrontal cortexes, you know, all that stuff.

But it doesn’t come from the world reaching down and trying to stretch them, pull them faster, right? We know that. We know that. So that’s one of the things I’m lobbying for as I’m lobbying for natural play spaces or adding nature to your yard or loose parts and all that kind of stuff. Uh, but the speeding up also and even feeling like because of these things and, and the adult world that is different than the migratory bird world or the clouds overhead world, it’s, we’re affected by the media.

We’re affected by stories that we hear all over the place. And then we limit our children, or we want them to, uh, rise academically, or we are fearful of them being, you know, snatched or hurt or whatever, and they’re indoors and, you know, all the stuff that we, you know, we think about and talk about and the reasons, the s- the slow thousand reasons why childhood has taken a hit.

But this is part of the, my new manifesto and what I’m realizing and what I’m intuiting and what I’m reading. When suddenly, you know, when you open, you open up to new ways of thinking, and suddenly it gets reinforced, not just by the algorithm, but by, you know… Oh my gosh, a bald eagle. Literally, a bald eagle is flying overhead over this little creek.

Wow.

Okay Well, for those who think that that’s a s- those kind of things are signs, we, we just got some sort of sign. Okay, well, that thing was huge. Yeah, they, they live more near the lake, but they must fly up these creeks to look for fish, other hun-hunting grounds or whatever else they eat. Hopefully not people or red newts.

Now where was I? Well, it was the idea that times are changing. Yes, childhood has taken a hit over the last couple decades or even generations, but research is now in, right? We know the research is in about screens and young children, the brain development. We know that research is in about teens and social media and addiction and depression and anxiety.

We know that, that research is in that nature i- is restorative, that can help rebalance our nervous systems, and research is in so much about play being the way You know, indisputably the way, the natural way that children learn, grow, and develop. So, you know, I’m preaching that kind of stuff and preaching that– I mean, in, in fact, this is kind of one of the amazing things.

Like, we can, we can think about that trend of childhood, and we can think about so many things in the world, news, wars, you know, all, all the bad stuff, but we can feel helpless. We can feel like, you know, we care. We have big, compassionate hearts. We don’t want bad things happening to, to people, and it breaks our hearts, things that are going on in the world, but we feel so helpless.

But here, this is one of those things that we don’t– not only do we not have to feel helpless about the state of childhood, but we all are in a position to help it. We are all– we all have the power and– because we can all do the small things that we can do, but it has a big effect on the children that we’re with.

When you carve out the time, space, and materials, when you, you know, protect children, you know, from the, the fast-paced world that’s trying to reach in and pull them, pull them to be older, pull them to academics, you know, sooner than they need to be, you know, all that stuff. When we protect that and we stand up and we get grounded in what we believe in, and we stand up for it, and we create that, we have the power to make change i- for the positive about something that we deeply care about, the state of childhood So that’s– I mean, how awesome is that?

So all these audiences that I talk to in all these places, like each– every person can have a positive effect on this subject that we care so deeply about. A-and that is not always the case when it’s, you know, trends, trends in the world and the greater culture that we, we don’t like so much. So I mean, how encouraging is that?

So that we all have the power, and so that’s, you know, that’s why I feel like my job, if your job and mission is to also make the world a better place by supporting the lives of children, young children, old children, youth, being more playful, supporting adults that support children, the whole thing. If you’re training, if you’re teaching, all of it.

We can make the difference. Okay, I’m rambling here, but you get what I’m saying. You make a difference, and I don’t know, I just think that’s so encouraging. So I could talk about The, the different stops. I could talk about how I prepare for a keynote. I could talk about some of the things that I learned.

Yeah. Well, I think that’s it. Just the idea that we are in it together, and we can make this change, um, that we’ve been lamenting, lamenting that change in childhood, and we can do it by working together, by feeling like we’re in it together. So I am all about creating community. And dear listener, I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but I have been cooking up something special for a couple years now, uh, that is basically forming a community of people like you and people like me who care about play, who are super excited about outdoor play.

The most exciting people and the most excited people about outdoor play, nature play, risky play, loose parts, adventure playgrounds, willow huts, mud kitchens, all that stuff. I’m forming a community of all of us who wanna be a part of it. I’m going to facilitate like a monthly thing, like a monthly session with content, and ideas, and images, and discussion, which will include…

People can send me pictures of their yard. I’ll do like, “What would Rusty say about my yard?” sessions and record them. Put, uh, have extra content. I’m going to, uh, you know, you can have tea time with me, access to me during the month, and we are going to grow together. We’re gonna learn, grow together in our journey of supporting children’s outdoor play.

And it’s gonna be for everybody, all stages of, you know, I think about like the growth path. We all wanna grow. We all wanna take the new steps and get to go to the next level. So, and this is the beautiful thing about going out in the world. I, I got to connect with people that are all different stages of supporting play and nature play, risky play, loose parts.

People who are just starting out, people that are s- that are students, people that are new teachers, people that have been doing more traditional play kinds of things, but they wanna step in this direction, but they’re totally new to it, and then people that have been doing it and having success, but still, you know, still uncertain.

People who are going full power doing it, you know, the experts in the field that we have so much to learn from, and then people that are, you know, take it to the next level of scaling it up and educating others and making like systems change. So this community, I’m, I’m calling it The Nature Play Academy Doesn’t that sound official?

Yeah. But maybe that’ll, that’ll, uh, get your, get your, uh, organization to help support you doing it, ’cause it’s the academy. But anyway, Nature Play Academy, I’m gonna … I’ll be talking about it more this summer, and then this fall I’m gonna start it up. And so we’re forming the community of people like us, like you.

I’m gonna facilitate it, and I feel like it’s tied a lot into these facilitated conversations, the risky play roundtables, where we just listen, listen to each other, and hear our concerns, or help each other, or give some hints, or share our experiences with things. And in that way, we are a community, and we’re growing together.

So anyway, I’d love for you to be part of it. So I’ll tell you more about it later. But I really kinda left each of these tour talks and the risky play roundtables just feeling like, oh, I’m so excited about this. Like, I- it’s kind of all I wanna do is, like, get together with all of you and keep having these conversations, and facilitating things, and hearing how, you know, the wisdom of the group, things that you’ve tried that could help someone who’s new.

Um, s- somebody who’s, you know, leading some other ways that could help you out with things, and just sharing that kind of stuff. And I just feel like, so we all can do it ourselves alone, knowing that we can have an effect on children’s lives, the children you work with, and the generations. But then knowing that, like, wow, if we come together collectively, we really can make change quicker Out on the road, uh, when I was in Alabama, one of the speakers before me said this African proverb, and he said, “If you wanna go fast, go by yourself.

But if you wanna go far, go together.” Huh? If you wanna go fast, go by yourself. But if you wanna go far, go together. And that’s what, that’s what I wanna do with this podcast. That’s what I wanna do with the Nature Play Academy. I want us to grow together, and then we’re gonna go far. We’re gonna make change.

Yeah. So how long is this going here? There’s so many, there’s so many conversations that could be separate podcasts, and I’ll probably do that because, you know, amazing to hear people’s thoughts in these risky play roundtables about, you know, their concerns with licensing. You know, the idea that they’re more afraid of when they think about their, their relation to risk, one to five, that they’re more afraid of licensing and health department than kids, like, doing the risky play thing.

And, and to me, that’s… Well, it’s sad, right? We know licensing is important. We know it’s in place to protect children, and that’s what we want, children to be healthy, happy, you know, whole. But when– If licensing is to protect bad things from happening to our children, and if licensing is making people stop supporting the play that is actually good for children’s development, well, these licensing rules or the fear of the licensing is actually damaging brain development, child development, whole body development.

And so doesn’t it seem a little weird? A little counterintuitive? So there are just, as they say, as my Canadian friends say about this stuff, “There are just some policy gaps.” Policy gaps with rules and regulations. And so I feel like that’s another part of the mission here going forward, is to kind of come together.

Because, I mean, I hear this everywhere I go. Every state I go in, every country that I travel and talk to people with early childhood, it’s all the same thing, the limitations of this. So there’s just some policy gaps, and maybe now is a good time to rethink rules with you and the other listeners, the experts.

Yeah, we come together, but we need to do it collectively. So, you know, that’s– There you go, right? Separate podcast, all this stuff. Yeah. The tour, Mississippi River was incredible. After I did my day of, you know, my day of talking and facilitating and working with people, I got to do a float on the river in a kayak on the Rock River, which connects to the Mississippi.

That was delightful I was in Milwaukee and I worked with a great group, Apple Ridge Academy. See, academy, it’s official. Amazing educators. We spent the whole day together and it was, yeah, we– I f- it was dreamy. We– I felt like we really connected. We had amazing conversations, lots of good play in the woods.

Some big things came up Going up a slide? That c- that will be a separate podcast. If you’re from Apple Ridge, right? That was a, that was a big one. But yeah, no, there’s a lot… I had a lot of thoughts about, about that afterwards too, so that’ll be a separate podcast. And Then I went to Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of Mexico, Alabama Gulf Shores, and it was part of their annual, uh, conference, early childhood conference down there, which was incredible and lively and just, again, amazing people.

I got to float in the water, and beforehand I did, you know, got centered by the, by the Gulf, did my thing, and then finished in Oklahoma at, uh, Bartlesville, which was north of Tulsa. I’m a big fan of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and so I got to visit some friends there and then go up to Bartlesville. But maybe I’ll just end on this It’s interesting, like, f-for, for me to do speaking, it’s kind of this intuitive thing.

And I try to, you know, my, my goal in life, besides the Red Noo, another part of my spiritual path is, um, kind of dedication to awakening and service. Awakening and service. And so, yeah. So I feel like these talks are a grand way for me to, to, to work on that and to be of service. And awakening for me in this case might be just opening, like opening to, to the universe, to, to ideas, to, you know, ways of being that I can share to an audience to, yeah, inspire them and know that they can do it, and not get overwhelmed, and take small steps.

So my process is really just, you know, for months, you know, I know that things are scheduled, and for months I just– I keep some paper on my desk, and when I have– ide-ideas will just come, and I’ll just scribble them. I won’t really think about them. I’ll just scribble like, “Oh, I’m gonna go to Moline. Oh, do a mess…”

You know, “Show this video about a messy play thing. Show this, you know, this picture about this, or tell this story.” And anyway, I’m collecting this over months, and then I just start… You know, it’s– time gets closer, and then I start shaping things, or I start tuning in and thinking about what I wanna talk about, and then I slowly build it.

So this time around, you know, sometimes I can relate to like, uh, stand-up comedians and how they work. Like, they have their material, and then they try it out, and they see what worked or what didn’t, what got a laugh or what didn’t get a laugh. They’re always fine-tuning. And it’s kinda neat for me to go on like a tour like this where there’s like f- you know, a certain series of talks right in a row, because then I’m kind of honing it.

I’m shifting things. I’m seeing, oh, what worked, or, oh, may-maybe that story should– would be better before this one, or that kind of thing. So it, it’s kind of– it’s a fun experience, and I try to just stay open and intuitive about it. So what I wanted to do was weave in that new manifesto, right? I, I wanna be talking about kind of my latest things.

So that was gonna be the introduction. And then, you know, I often show lots of pictures. If you’ve seen my, any presentations or, you know… I love, I love– I’m a visual person. I love to show, you know, lots of pictures of all the stuff happening. And my books are, you know, lots of pictures and, you know, whatever, the loose parts guides and all that kind of stuff.

So I had the introduction, and I, uh, then did the pictures. Okay, that went, that went really well. Then I had the, you know, Risky Play Roundtable. This was the one in Illinois, the first one. Great. Well, then I came back, and I started, you know, keep, kept working on it. I started to think about other stories that could be part of this.

And, and then I just started thinking about m-m maybe more planting seeds with an audience by telling stories. What if I just did that? So anyway, that was just kind of in the back of my mind. And so then I went out to the number two on the tour. This was… I was staying in Milwaukee, and then it was outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

And, you know, s- I admit it, when I’m planning these things and there’s four things, there’s four airplane things, and there’s four, you know, car rental places, and there’s four different places to stay and, you know, all this kind of stuff, well, that’s a lot of details. Uh, yeah, it’s a lot of details to keep track of.

And I realized I, I don’t know if I had touched base fully about the AV, my AV needs f- so I… the night before I email like, “Oh, you know, just need a, need a screen and a projector. You know, just wanna make sure that… We might have talked about that, but…” And then I get an email back, “No, we, we don’t ha- we weren’t planning for that.

And in fact, we’re gonna be outside in a tent.” And I was like, “Gulp. Uh-oh.” And in all the years I’ve been doing presentations, th-that might have happened one time, but not really. I don’t know, maybe when I was first starting. Uh, but I mean, if I’ve been doing this for, like, you know, decades Uh, so anyway, but when I got that message back, part of me was like, “Oh, well, maybe we can work it out,” and we say, “Oh yeah, if you can get a projector, that’d be great, you know, ’cause I got lots of pictures I’m excited to show.”

But then another part of me said, “Oh, actually, I know you know exactly how to… what to do if you d- if you don’t have pictures.” And basically, it was stretch that new, that new manifesto that what was, what was the introduction? You could make that an hour. You could have discussions in it. You could develop these, you know, these topics.

And so I actually felt okay, and sure enough, got there, and it’s outside the tent. They did get a screen and projector, but you couldn’t see anything, so I just close it up, and by golly, I’m going for it. I’m gonna go for it with no pictures. And then it went so well. I felt so connected to everybody in the audience, and we had our, you know, very hot building.

We had our risky play roundtable, and I just felt there w- like there wasn’t a distraction of the pictures. We could really be present with each other. And so I really loved it. And some part of me had jokingly… You know, I thought, “Well, of course, the other two, I have a AV in place. You know, we got screens and everything all prepared.”

But another little funny part of my brain was like, “Well, why don’t you just do none of them with pictures? Ha ha ha, of course I’m gonna do pictures.” But the more I thought about it, the more I tried to really embody that and think of, think of myself more as a storyteller and sharing the ideas and the experiences, this new manifesto, and really, it’s almost like planting seeds, you know, not putting pictures that distract, but having the pictures in the audience’s mind and heart, like they have their own pictures.

And I felt… So I did it the next two. The one at the Gulf of Mexico was, I was definitely nervous. I was excited and a little terrified, and I tried to tell myself, “No, no, make that terror. That’s just excitement. You’re just excited.” But to be like, “All right, I’m doing this at a professional development day, but a, a full audience of a con- conference and with no pictures, and are they looking for my pictures?

Would they be disappointed if they don’t, I don’t have my pictures?” Or, well, anyway, it, it went so well. I was, I was so happy. I felt so connected to the audience. I hope they felt connected to me. Felt like it. And after that, I was like, “Oh my gosh, that was… That felt so good. That was like the best, my, my favorite keynote of all time.

Yes.” Until the next one, and the next one in Bartlesville was in this grand performing arts, uh, center. Amazing. Seventeen hundred seats. We filled it with a hundred people, a hundred excited early childhood p- people and parents, grandparents. And I– because of the, doing it the, the ti- two days before, I felt really confident.

Th- this is me. I’m, I’m, I’m being vulnerable here. I’m sharing with you. But yeah, I felt really good and comfortable and like, “Oh.” Whereas the one in the Gulf of Mexico felt like, oh, I’m trying something. Well, the one in Bartlesville felt like, oh, this is what I do now. And what I do is try to share my heart and share my thoughts and, and my experiences and be a good listener to the audience and give them the floor and learn from them and try to c-create a great experience and try to support people wherever they’re at, wherever they are at on that growth path and kind of bring that fire and feed the fire in, in, in everybody I come in contact with that, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re working with children.

You’re there working with children. It’s like, okay, what can you do? And what are those small steps and how do you keep going? And planting seeds, planting seeds, planting seeds. I definitely relate to the Johnny Appleseed story and person or idea or myth and, uh, you know, I used to with… when I was doing more of the traveling, doing the playground builds, you know, design and builds and, and certainly now planting seeds in a different way to support people to feel excited and empowered to make little changes, to support play in new ways, to say yes to play, to let things, you know, get a little looser, to create the slow, you know, slow play movement, you know, to be able to have that kind of space for children to be children, to create the, the conditions for play.

So it felt really good just to be r-right there with an audience and planting the seeds, you know, in a, in a fun, loving way. And yeah, we shall see what grows. But I hope I planted some seeds for you too. Getting new ideas? Are you feeling empowered to do some, some stuff, make some change? change this, the trends and trajectory of childhood.

Yeah, you know, the idea that childhood is just getting more and more and more limited, worse, worse, worse. Like now we know better with screens and teens and, you know, everything in betweens about all the stuff that’s just kind of messing it up. Well, we know better. So now we can act. Now we can come together.

We can come together as communities. We can come together as peers. We can come together as mutual inspirers of each other to make the changes that we want. Even teeny little changes will make the big, big effect. So, all right. So let’s form that community, right? Oh, it’s formed. It’s happening. All right.

Well, thanks for listening to that, that, that rambling and those stories. And I hope, I hope that was enjoyable. And then we’ll, we’ll dive into some of the, maybe some of those topics in future podcast episodes. All right. Till next time. See ya.

All right. Thanks for listening Do you have a comment or a question? Email me at playnaturepodcast@gmail.com. You know I like talking about this stuff, and maybe we could use your question on a future podcast episode. As always, I have some free goodies for you in the show notes, including my outdoor loose parts guide.

Fun stuff in there. And so I wish you the best in your outdoor play adventures. And when it comes to adding nature to your yard, or loose parts, or saying yes to risky play, my favorite motto is, “Dream big, start small, and never stop.” Oh, yeah. Woo, woo, woo, woo. Let’s do it. All right, have fun out there