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.