Environmental psychologist Louise Chawla has written extensively about childhood, nature, and ecstatic memory – the impact nature and animals have on people who pursue a creative or artistic life. Interviewing writers, poets and artists, she found that many recalled solitary encounters with nature – a favorite beach, a fishing spot, a park or beloved woods – as igniting a creative spark in them. These encounters with the natural world, Chawla found, constituted multiple dimensions of freedom and imagination. Freedom, she wrote, was evident both as a physical fact and as a state of mind.

The very environment in which children moved offered freedom in the sense of potentiality – an opennes to exploration and discovery in a place that “beckoned enthrallingly.” In most cases, this ecstatic quality belonged to the environment – gardens, the seashore, a lake, prairie land, forests and fields. Often, it was an open space that the child could move through safely and willingly, as in the writer and poet Howard Thurman, who told of the woods that befriended him.”I tended to wander away to be alone for a time for in that way I could sense the strength of the quiet and the aliveness of the woods.”

I’ve seen interview after interview with artists, writers and poets who spoke of an ecstatic experience in nature when they were young, a place that opened them up to the potential of their own work and lives. Mary Oliver’s work is suffused with ecstatic memory. For me, ecstatic experience has become an important part of my life, although I came to it later. I remember loving a sprawling cemetery in Providence, R.I., vanishing into its enclosures, quiet rows and paths. The cemetery was my friend, it was not haunting but peaceful, not disturbing but reassuring, a safe place where even the cruelest of boys would not go.

Now, ecstatic experience is different. A walk in the woods. Herding with Red. Feeding the animals. Doing chores with Maria. Photographing light. Swimming in the natural world. For sure, these experiences are radioactive seeds of the imagination, to grow and blossom in the consciousness again and again.