When I was young, I learned to feel the world, the sting of cold air on a
tiny face, stinging as my nose runs and my mother wipes it, again, and my
skin starting to stay red from repeated wiping.

My earliest memories are of winter. Wrapped up in stiff little bundles,
trudging through snow almost as deep as I am tall. Moon boots and visits to
frozen ponds in the city parks, then cold early spring days, seeing the
ponds melted and hosting flocks of honking geese, eager for a handout of
bread. I remember the torn up bits of cheap white bread my mother would
prepare for just these occasions, though now she'd object that one shouldn't
feed wildlife and wild things should be left be.

Of course, now I live in the mountains, and wild things are best left there,
we more a part of their world than them a part of ours, no man-made ponds in
city parks here, instead we hike trails hacked out of brush, past bear caves
and hollows where a mountain lion may live. The wild things are reclusive,
elusive, but always present. 

I still feel the world, skin-first, then sights and smells flooding in. I
managed to maintain that connection, to everything. Not too many hard
plastic chairs and lessons at chalkboards, and more walks, not nature walks,
since all walks are nature walks, whether one intends or not. Seeds spill
from dead flower tops onto sidewalks or paths, and paths sprout up green
wherever they are, a living thing that has had its place to live chosen for
it by circumstance.

The world forms a place for learning much more vivid than even lockers
painted vibrant red, yellow plastic chairs and blue walls covered in posters
can. On evenings where air hangs hot and humid, lingering past the sun's
setting, even if we're not paying attention, we learn of the world's
working, the heat trapped by the air, the motion stirred by the sun as it
strikes the next place it shines. The world breathes, and the knowledge
flows in faster than one can possibly receive it and know it all, but it is
there when one looks for it.

The organic knowledge spreads, cell by cell, branching upward, rooting
downward, reaching slowly but surely into everything.

If one looks long enough, things we'd think too abstract are present: The
arches of branches, the pressing of roots against sidewalks are mathematical
certainties, perturbed a little to look more what we'd call natural, but the
pieces are the same as buidings gleaming against a skyline to a cedar
standing two hundred feet tall, or buttresses holding a church wall up,
matching neatly the knobby roots of cypress trees. Even the marvels of
engineering are more discovered than created.

After we know, deeply, how the world works, the rest can fall into place.
If there are spirits of the air, they exist in the whirls of wind,
certain and simple individually, but growing into complicated twists as they
interact with the world. We can name them in maths and models, but names can
never keep up with the world. Every name and every certainty reveals another
layer of knowledge that's been covered by the last. Discovery doesn't end
any mysteries, just reveals more.

----

You can learn of the world most of all by interacting with it. A model is
well and good, the knowledge of something Other, but it is just a model,
incomplete by definition since it is not the thing that it represents. You
lay our knowledge out, act based on it, and see how the world reacts. When
it surprises us and the model breaks, we make a new one, we adapt.
Reality as we see it changes, since we look at the world through our
expectations about how it works.

The geese in the pond are waddly, friendly. They follow me around, hoping
for another bready handout, quacking noisily, and sometimes shaking
themselves, laying feathers that have been rustled by the wind back into
place.

I reach out with a piece of bread offered, and four simultaneously descend,
snapping at my clumsy mittens, one pinching my hand and they're much faster
than I ever expected from waddling birds.

Suddenly the park is a little more dangerous to my two year old mind, and I
pull back and cry a bit. Surprises sometimes hurt a bit. But the next time,
I hold the bread out a bit further, and I pull my hand back the moment one
of the birds takes a snap, and they miss me neatly. A piece of bread falls
to the ground, and there's a honking frenzy as the geese descend, pushing me
out of the way and feasting as much as is possible when you split a slice of
bread eight ways.

Sometimes the world's a bit rough, but you can't shave off all the rough
edges.

----

I quit school after fourth grade.

I certainly didn't quit learning. School was fine, I suppose -- rows of
chairs, and a teacher who was interested in keeping order first, and a
lesson second. As long as we did "well enough" on tests every couple years,
nobody suffered too badly. The teachers claimed their paychecks, we claimed
our reportcards, and we could lather, rinse, and repeat.

Fifth grade, however, was looking a lot like it was going to be more
standing in lines than actual learning. The teacher was strict, the classes
formal and trying to prepare us for more rigorous tests coming up in the
future. We may not need the knowledge just then, or maybe even ever, but
tests must be passed, so the teachers must adapt.

It wouldn't be a pleasant change after a summer spent learning freely. I'd
started memorizing nearly everything about cities in the world from the huge
map we had as wallpaper in the dining room. I'd eat my cereal and stare at a
new corner of the map each day. I hated the days I ended up sitting facing
away from the map. I always made sure to take the spot everyone had to shove
past to get down the stairs, just so I could see the map that much better.

"Did you know there's a country called Georgia, too?", I'd ask. Or my
favorite stumper, "Quick! Name two cities in South Dakota." ... just about
nobody ever could. Sometimes people might stammer out "Wall" or "Pierre",
but only one person ever got both at the same time. If they did, asking for
a third was always a sure stumper.

When my classmates were learning pre-pre-algebra, and trying to work out
geometric proofs from textbooks that only ever worked with simple squares
and triangles, I was copying down the shapes of flags, and reading about the
history of the place I'd picked this moment.

I'd invent paper airplane designs, and my sister would take them for test
flights. She always liked the little dart-like planes that you could wail
across the room, but I loved the wide flat planes that would make circling
arcs around and around before coming to a stop.

My mother took us to a shopping mall, mostly closed down because of
mismanagement, and we'd stand on the deserted second story balcony and
launch airplanes out over the deserted atrium. We'd watch as the planes hung
in the still air, barely coasting, barely moving, barely falling, or my
sister's distance record, a long straight throw of five hundred feet,
landing neatly wedged under the door to a closed up shop.

Airflow over a wing might be numbers in a book at first for most people who
even stop to consider it, but for us, it was second nature. I still catch
myself making an airfoil with my hands as I let my arm hang out a car
window, and feeling the lift and drag as we speed down the road.

I learned algebra backward. Or inside-out, I suppose. I started with 
working systems, and twisted them around piece by piece until they did what
I needed. My dad built a house. We'd start with the shape we needed, and
twist the numbers to make sure it would be strong enough. Timbers grew,
spans changed a little, figuring the forces as they go down the triangle
shapes, pushing at both ends in differing proportions. 

Snow presses downward, and downward becomes outward as it presses in the
middle of a roof. The proportions are easy to calculate, but just as easy to
feel if you imagine the heavy blanket spread out over the house, pressing
its even, heavy hand downward at every point.