Military Children & Nature: Reciprocity, Resilience, and Nurture

A beautiful nature trail at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas.

“The land knows you, even when you are lost.” That is a quote from Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Most military children would guffaw at the idea -- we're always moving consistently, adapting to entirely different environments, constantly being the outsider in what feels like a fortressed community. How could the land know us? If we are people who are constantly lost, how could we be identified?

In Kimmerer’s book, she explores the relationship between plants and humans, more specifically the reciprocal and resilient nature of plants and how that correlates to human perspective. As I continued reading, I began to find some similarities with a plant’s life and a military child’s life. These correlations revolve around resilience, reciprocation, and nurture. When a plant yields its harvest, it is not without sacrifice, a sacrifice that can be paralleled with the military lifestyle.

The core plant values are resilience, reciprocation, and nurture. These are the laws that shape our world as military kids, too. The nurture that we receive in our military communities, our families, and our friends are how we grow into the people we are.

As we begin to grow, we share the same fear of a plant: the peripheral danger of being uprooted, losing the soil we had just begun to grow our roots in. Our deep connections now cut short. However, our lives do not stop after a move. After the unearthing of our roots, we continue to grow. That is resilience.

Like a plant, we seem to leave a memento of us behind -- a seed, pollen, or some roots that stayed in the ground. These lingering elements do not come to halt once we leave, but rather they start their own growth process. Our seeds or pollen are the impacts we leave behind: our ideas, the relationships that we grew into, and our identity that blossomed in those spaces. Just as the seeds or pollen are left behind, we leave our own special mark, marks that continue to grow too.

Resilience: a characteristic that I feel is almost completely parallel to the experience of a military kid. The sign of a drooping blossom or a stem that has gone askew is usually ominous for a plant's fate and a way to communicate a need for nurture. Once that need is quenched, whether through sunlight or water, the plant begins to balance again, indicated by an especially sweet smell from the flower or the taut structure of a stem. The plant’s ultimate goal is to survive. Whether that means signaling poor health, emitting different chemicals, or digging into deep energy stores, the main priority is survival.

Military kids seem to replicate that exactly. Our goal is to survive. We communicate, we learn, we adapt, and we reach deep. Once we begin to receive nurturing in our new community, literally reaching our lifeline, we begin to blossom too. Stand a bit taller like a healthy stem. Be a bit more kind and confident, like a sweet flower. Our resilience is rewarded. It is reciprocated. 

Sacrifice for sacrifice. Reward for reward. To nurture and to be nurtured. Reciprocation is the way we live our lives and the way a plant lives theirs, too. The roots we leave behind are replaced by the new ones we grow. The sacrifices we give or the fruit we yield are the abundance we give to others. The nurture we receive, we try to give to the next kid -- because we know. We know that our lives revolve around reciprocation. It is our responsibility to bestow the lessons we have learned to others; we must reciprocate.

Truly, we all have a lesson to learn from nature. That is because we are nature -- we have come from it, and we have learned it. There is no reason as to why we would not reflect it. The land knows us even when we are lost because, simply, we are the land.