Svetlana Litvinchuk

As a child in Ukraine, I grew up in a family that normalized extended camping and gifted me not only a love but a familiarity, a deep friendship with the natural world, a home there. Every day from the ebb of April snowmelts to the early chill of September we lived in a small village on the banks of the Desna River. It came complete with a full propane oven, lace curtains, and dozens of sleeping tents outfitted with Persian rugs. In an era when citizens couldn’t travel outside the borders of the USSR (nor had the funds to do so), it was common to carve summer dachas out of the shores of rivers – fishing, swimming, braiding hair, and singing songs to the guitars of families camping near us. To this day entire villages of friends and neighbors continue the tradition into their fourth and fifth generations of camping on the same beach.

After we moved to the United States despite taking to the language quickly and dropping my accent, I never quite fit in with my peers. I tried to be interested in video games and pop culture but remained driven to spend time outside. I grew up navigating the lingering effects of being suddenly uprooted and transplanted to a new country, like a small tree tasked with adjusting to a life with no rituals or traditions or special places that felt like home.

These days I’ve carved a little farm out of the Ozarks where I practice permaculture and delight in finding new plants that spontaneously pop out of the ground, often without my intervention. But I meet more people who call themselves indoorsy than I do nature enthusiasts. And I wonder if they simply weren’t introduced to the lushness of sleeping on cool grass while they were young enough to form that bond. If they weren’t taught to trust themselves and their bodies to negotiate feeling so small and vulnerable under the rotations of the Milky Way. 

I think it’s the single greatest gift we can give our children— this bond with an Earth that can sustain them long after we’re gone. I think we owe it to both future generations and the planet itself to make childhoods like mine not unique, but a common story of feeling at home on an Earth on which we’re never, ever alone if we learn to speak its language.