I double dog dare you...

As a child, I had measles twice (two different kinds), whooping cough and mumps. I was stung by various winged barbed creatures and received a poultice made of Prince Albert tobacco mixed with the spit of the closest adult. Running barefoot six months of the year, I experienced the agony of de-feet (that one is for you, Thad) when ringworm was treated with a stream of instant freeze. It took mama and daddy to hold me down while they administered the cure. Sandspur spines broken off in my feet often became infected and required puncturing and methiolate. I learned to swim, sort of, in a dark brown tannin rich river. The big boys would swing out over the deep hole on a long rope and let go, creating waves that dunked me as I earnestly practiced the Dead Man’s Float. Cat scratches, falling off bicycles, falling out of trees, falling over tree roots and stubbing my toe, falling off horses… I was free to roam the farm where we lived… free to read lying down by my bucket raised calf, Sukey Lou… free to get my feet stepped on as I hung out with the horses… free to play with poisonous pokeberries making pies and ink and having tea parties… such were the accepted risks of childhood in my day.
Nowadays, I see parents practicing risk free parenting, trying to eliminate all danger from their children’s worlds. Some of this is due to our perception of the world as a dangerous place peopled by perverts, kidnappers and drug dealers. Strangers, not neighbors, live next door to us and we fear exposing our children to the not so tender mercies of the unknown. And, much of our common space is indeed more dangerous than it used to be. Nevertheless, I am fascinated by the need to eliminate risk from the childhood experience.
I learned some valuable lessons from my risky childhood. I learned when you come a cropper, you get help. If help isn’t immediately available, you pick yourself up and tend to it yourself. That’s how I learned to put gloves on when pulling sandspurs from my feet. When you fall off the horse running full speed ahead, knocking the breath out of you, you lay in the sand gasping like a beached fish until your lungs work again. You don’t tell because it is a part of growing up, testing limits, learning how to survive. Some of my friends tell wonderful stories of blowing up things with chemistry sets, putting pennies on the train track and watching the train flatten them as it passes by, pea shooters manned in trees shooting into open windows of passing cars startling unsuspecting motorists, riding (or trying to ride) greased pigs in home grown rodeos.
David Steindl-Rast says; “To live is to take risks. It is absolutely central. Courage and risk are essential to aliveness. And aliveness is the thing we all strive for and long for, yet sometimes barricade ourselves against out of fear…even as we are still longing for it. If we are not taking risks, it is for the same reason that people do take risks, namely, we want to be alive. We all want the same thing. I am reminded of the elderly man who lives in a house with a steep wheelchair ramp leading down to the street. There is always a lot of traffic on his street and every morning, my friend sees him going full speed down the ramp in his wheelchair. One day she asked him, ‘Isn’t this dangerous?’ And he said, with sparks in his eyes, laughing, ‘Yesssss,it is!’
Lord of the Unknown, every now and then, would you please double dog dare me to take some new risks? And when I see something that needs doing that I don’t know how to do, or when someone I don’t know needs help and scariest of all, needs my friendship, I want to pick up my sling shot, let the bedsheets down over the walls, speak to strangers and live life as a risky business, going about looking for God in all the wrong places. Love you…