Free Range Child

Want to see something lovely?

Well, you’re in luck. This video clip is just a taste of a full-length feature film that’s being produced by a partnership of Films for Action and Overgrow the System, a grassroots organization dedicated to “raising awareness around our food system and how to live a life that is more in tune with nature.”

Free Range Child: Raising Children Connected to the Earth & Their Food examines the connection between children’s development and their connection to the natural world and to food production. “It celebrates the lives of families and their support networks, both rural and urban, who are engaged in linking children with nature,” explains the film’s website. “And it savors the bounty of precious moments of discovery, magic, and growth that spring forth from these connections.”

In case you were scrambling to jot down the fabulous quote at the beginning of the video, attributed to author and filmmaker Valerie Andrews, let me save you the trouble of re-playing it again:

“As a child, one has that magical capacity to move among the many eras of the earth; to see the land as an animal does; to experience the sky from the perspective of a flower or a bee; to feel the earth quiver and breathe beneath us; to know a hundred different smells of mud and listen unselfconsciously to the soughing of the trees.”