Wherever and however you travel, there’s connection to nature, to the earth.
This is as true when you go to distant places and take long journeys as it is when you travel just down the road or look out the window.
Perhaps your travel involves nature focused aspects: camping, water sports, visits to remote wildlands for instance. Maybe looking out that window and going around your neighborhood works for you.
Whatever your choices, it’s spring in the northern hemisphere, when nature, the earth and caring for the earth are especially remarked and celebrated.
Consider these ways to connect with aspects of nature and learn about the earth, however your travel takes place.
Maybe you make photographs as you travel. Do you draw, though?
Whether you are an experienced artist or you’re saying “Wait, I can’t even draw a stick figure” you will find much to explore and enjoy in Clare Walker Leslie’s book Keeping a Nature Journal.
Walker, as she points out herself, didn’t know an oak leaf from a maple one when she started out. She learned along the way, about aspects of the earth from clouds to trees, from ducks to seagulls and many aspects of nature in between.
She also learned about drawing, making notes and journaling about nature in her travels to places near and far.
It is as much if not more about the practice of observing, about seeing, about taking time with all that as it is about technical skill, she points out.
That’s also why you will enjoy and find it useful to draw a record of your time with nature on your travels, whether you take photographs or not.
That’s not to say Walker doesn’t talk about technique; she teaches a lot about that, in practical ways.
Her teaching is in that context of observation, reflection, and mindset. That approach serves to make what she has to say interesting and accessible across many levels of experience with drawing, and with thinking about nature, the earth, and travel.
The book is well structured, too.The opening chapters have to do with why you’d want to keep a nature journal, practicalities of setting one up, and basic drawing techniques. There are ideas and examples on how to keep a nature journal going over time, and why’d you’d want to do that, too.
All of these ideas will give you tools you can use as a traveler, and at home as well.
That’s true of the rest of the book also. There are eight chapters featuring ideas for drawing and journaling about specific aspects of nature, from domestic and wild animals to birds, plants, clouds, and landscapes. Walker also shows and explains the value of returning to places (many of her drawings come from Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near where she lives) and thinking about and drawing nature through changing seasons.
There’s another whole section with ideas and resources for educators, which will come in handy for parents and caregivers as well.
Through the book Leslie offers many of her own illustrations, including finished and unfinished stages. She shares examples from other artists as well. The writing is thoughtful and engaging, a good companion to the many illustrations. Not interested in drawing? Spending time thinking visually in the ways Walker suggests will improve your skills for photography as well.
Chances are, whatever your creative practice, you will come away from this book with insights on connections between humankind and the earth and its many facets.
Ways to think about nature are part of what comes up in Carrie Newcomers’s book Until Now, too. Newcomer is a musician, and a poet.
Though her work isn’t exclusively focused on the natural world. she often draws on or includes aspects of nature and human connection in her work.
As part of the poem Liminality, Newcomer writes
I am drawn to liminal spaces
The half-tamed and unruly path
Where the forest gives way
And my little garden begins.
Where water, air, and light overlap
Becoming mist on the morning pond.
I like to sit on my porch steps, barn jacket and boots
In the last long exhale of the day
When bats and birds loop in and then out
One rising to work,
One readying for sleep.
And although the full moon calls the currents,
And the dark moon reminds me
That my best language
Has always emerged out of the silence,
It is in the waxing and waining
Where I most often live,
Neither here nor there,
But simply
On the way.
Newcomer has been living through the same time of challenges in the world we all have these past two years or so. Though she rarely references events directly, you will see elements you recognize in poems including The Point of Arrival, Making Sense, Even Then, and Revolution: The Day After. There are also dashes of humor — a poem about an abundance of egg gourds is one of those.
Newcomer is based in Indiana in the US Midwest. She is an award winning singer and songwriter who travels the world with her music.
A while back I suggested to you that poetry is a good thing to have in your travel kit, and that songwriters may just be the best travel writers.
Those ideas still ring true. So do other elements from our archives. That’s the third way I offer you to connect with nature: check out our explorations, see what we have learned and the ideas and knowledge we’ve brought back to share with you.
A few stories of nature to get you started on that
Skye spent time hiking in around the Plitvice Lakes in Croatia . It’s a UNESCO World Heritage site that’s considered to have the most beautiful waterfalls in Europe
Chantae visited Victoria Falls from the Zimbabwe side, and contemplated the many ways to measure a waterfall
Sheila explored Sea Rim, a southeast Texas state park of salt marsh and beaches in a place you might not expect
Liz told you of her adventures looking for kiwis in New Zealand and clued you in on places to check out if you’d like to do that
Tim took you whitewater rafting by Glacier National Park in Montana.
I brought you along to Sliabh Liag, in Donegal. , to explore a cliff region in Ireland you may not have heard of
We have many more stories of connection with nature for you to explore, from stargazing to gators to northern lights. to waterfalls. — and of course, we tell you about unexpected aspects of the world’s cities, towns, and roads too. Stay with us as our travels continue.
Photographs by by Ioannis Ioannidis from Pixabay, by Kurt Deiner from Pixabay, by Jakub Gorjek, and by Kerry Dexter.
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