A Matter of Focus

We're having lots of rain lately (yay!) and rain brings robins. Looking out the window a few days ago, I saw this:

I purposefully didn't adjust the color too much because there was a dusky sameness across the view, and that is exactly what was so interesting...

Do you notice where your eye goes?

Did you notice that there are actually two robins in the picture?

I looked away and looked back several times - the higher contrast of the male robin really does the trick. To add to it, as I watched and took (lots) of pictures), first the pair walked away from each other, and then the male started squawking at me - to further draw my attention away. Fascinating.

How wise nature is!

Snow fun - bring your umbrella!

I found some pictures I took last month after Bean got her new umbrella (note one of our spring snow visitations!). Umbrellas are not just for rain! Snow is fun in all kinds of ways, as she illustrates here. Don't you love how snow brings out the joyful awe and amazement in us?

Whiplash? Will spring stick this time?

We've been having a weird spring here in Colorado... I think the plants are handling better than their human counterparts right now, frankly. After a series of back-and-forth weeks of sudden deep snows followed by warm (to hot) weather and back again, it's hard to know which way is up. Somehow it's not just about which clothes to pull out for the day (or unpack from the closet), it's what to do with the pent-up energy that just wants to burst forth from our hearts.

Sigh. Maybe it's just that I live with a three-year-old.

Anyway, after the 75 degree day yesterday, this was today:

 

... and with a four-month-old...

... we're not about to venture out too much (my bravery increases as my infant ages!).

So we settled for some food-based food coloring fun instead. Enjoy!



Stirring in the coloring

 

Decorating in progress

 

A cake only a preschooler could love (or eat)!

A Brush With Mortality and How Much I Have Yet to Learn

 

 



My daughter was playing in the backyard by herself, something we let her do for some independence, alone time, creative play, and bonding with the earth. I was busy inside, but I hear my husband say, "Wait a minute - those are Mommy's plants. Let's ask her about it." I ran out immediately, thinking it was time for another lesson about gentle and that hurts the plant.

 

Nope. Different topic.

 

Bean had her hands full of flower petals, but what stopped me in my tracks was that she was chewing.

 

"Bean, what are you doing?"

 

"These are JUICY!!"

 

Witness panicked mother pick up her child and go running into the house to call the crisis hotline (a.k.a. her own mother).

 

So (after some online research), did you know:

• The plant pictured above is Muscari neglectum, also commonly called a grape hyacinth.
• It is a perennial spring bulb, often following the bloom of crocus. (Right now it's the only thing blooming in our yard.)
• Originally from Europe, North Africa, and Asia, Muscari has naturalized many places. In some places, it runs rampant and is considered invasive.
• The blossoms are used as flavoring in Europe and have a sour grapey taste.

And, it so happens, Bean confirms the taste description. And it was apparently interesting enough that she tried to go back again later. :)

 

Today's Nature Lesson

Part of Nature's being is a completeness of the cycle of life - meaning, the reality of death is something experienced constantly. I've talked before about how change is part of that process, but through any number of missteps, we can quickly meet our own demise through seemingly innocent actions. I think our young children can teach us a lot in how they can connect more easily to their intuitive knowing, but as parents we have to weigh against how curiosity can lead astray too (think touching the stove burners).

 

How much I have to learn about what is safe and what is not, though! I have some uneasy relief that Bean's ok (made it through the night with no mishaps despite some sites saying it's a diuretic), but it's reminder that I know less than I like about what is safe and what isn't in my own backyard.

 

 

Just for fun... This photo first aired here. Little did I know it would have a further story to tell later!

 

Do you have any tales of eating plants or how you put your trust/mistrust in nature in the wrong place?

Playing with the Wind

My daughter took her new umbrella outside to play - no rain, but no matter. The wind was her best playmate, as it buffeted her around. Giggling away, she was surprised by each gust. As I watched, she experimented with different ways to hold it, getting sent across the yard in one direction or another, until she decided to take cover low to the ground, and low and behold, the umbrella stayed still.

She shows her basic technique

Where we live near the mountains, the winds (sometimes called "Chinooks" after the Native American people of the Pacific Northwest) can blow fiercely and often. The native plants of this area have adapted to it - either low to the ground (like my daughter discovered), or thin and able to let the wind pass through without harm.

 

Today's Nature Lesson

I can let so many small things during my day get to me... Sometimes I find that by evening, I'm tense all over, particularly in the jaw and shoulders, as I tighten up and hold it all in. I've been holding strong against the storm of my day, I think, except that it's not really strength. I'm not being a rock; I'm more like a tree splitting apart. Better for me to breathe into what's happening - to literally take deep breaths - and allow for spaciousness, for acceptance or at least willingness for life to take a different turn than I expected. Maybe I can be like the grasses that let the winds blow through while they carry on, to be flexible while resilient.

Wordsworth: Let Nature Teach

In such a connected world, we often don't realize how we know something or that the idea may not have come from us! "Nothing's new under the sun," I suppose. Enjoy William Wordsworth's poem below, which includes encouragement to "Let Nature Teach!"

The Tables Turned

By William Wordsworth
 

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;

Or surely you'll grow double:

Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;

Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain's head,

A freshening lustre mellow

Through all the long green fields has spread,

His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:

Come, hear the woodland linnet,

How sweet his music! on my life,

There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!

He, too, is no mean preacher:

Come forth into the light of things,

Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,

Our minds and hearts to bless—

Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,

Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,

Of moral evil and of good,

Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—

We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;

Close up those barren leaves;

Come forth, and bring with you a heart

That watches and receives.

Today's Nature Lesson

Through nature we connect to that deep, wordless wisdom of the universe. I find the interaction between human culture and nature fascinating, but Wordsworth reminds us here that whatever we think we know, nature (as a part of the divine and the universe) can always open our eyes and hearts to much more.

Keep Your Eyes Open

I love looking up for the moon when I'm out at night. This week I saw the moon in a way I'd never seen her before - just the barest glimmer of a crescent, just barely past the dark new moon. It looked paper thin, just so barely there.

I was walking back to my car at the time, and after taking a moment to put my bag away, I turned to look up again. Where was it? Didn't I just see it? A thick patch of cloud, heavy after the crispness of the moon, was covering it over - you could see a faint glow behind the clouds, but that was all.

So momentary to me, but so beautiful. And to think I almost missed it!

Today's Nature Lesson

Be watchful. Things can change in a moment - be aware and be awake. There is only now.

Learning about Nature: Spring Nature Books for Kids

I read together with my kids a ton; it's a great way to explore. Together we've been exploring the concept of spring from several facets: how it affects animals, what it means for plants, and the mystery and meaning behind it that inspires us as humans.

Spring for Animals

Our special reading for the first day of Spring (Vernal Equinox) was Snow Rabbit, Spring Rabbit: A Book of Changing Seasons by Il Sung Na, which teaches the different survival strategies of animals living through the winter until spring arrives. A little rabbit travels all over to see what the many animals of the forest, air, and water do.

Simply beautiful illustrations - layered and colorful, full of whimsy. The uniqueness, creativity, and cleverness of each animal shines through. I also love Na's careful word choice; for example, for wild geese it reads:

Some fly away from the cold.

Often we explain that "birds fly south for the winter," but this evokes a different understanding. All winter we have watched the Canadian geese fly back and forth over our skies as the temperatures change constantly here with the crazy Colorado weather. My daughter and I also enjoyed the squirrel pages, as we have watched two "squirrelers" eat constantly the past months.

Spring for Plants

We added this book (plus a new metal watering can) a few days later: And Then It's Spring by Julie Fogliano, told in rhythmic open verse.

First you have brown, all around you have brown     

and then there are seeds         

and a wish for rain

A little boy, along with his dog, rabbit, and turtle, plant a garden and carefully watch and wait for spring to arrive. There is such patience, curiosity, and love present in how he is in his garden. I love how he clearly spends each day outside, no matter the weather, experiencing and accepting it just as it is. He clearly isn't one where the sun needs to shine every day for happiness. This is one of those books where there are lots of little details to talk about in addition to the story. My preschooler watered each of the seeds over and over again on each page to help transform the brown world into a green one.

What Spring Means to Us

With some of the mystery of Old World Europe, Rechenka's Eggs by Patricia Polacco provides a wonderful way to connect the themes of Easter to the beginning of spring. Babushka, an old woman living alone, has always spent the long winters lovingly painting special eggs for the Easter Festival, but when she nurses a injured goose back to health, she is rewarded with a beautiful surprise.

This book is full of layers of meaning. Babushka is a wise woman, seen through the understanding and compassion she shows all the animals she meets - caribou, geese. All winter long she paints eggs, a symbol of rebirth and new life. Winter is an introspective time, a time to turn within. The earth rests and all growth and change happens quietly underground - as it does within us. The ritual Babushka uses to prepare for spring is to paint these beautiful reminders, a meditation on spring.

Her grateful goose lays 12 amazingly beautiful eggs to replace those that were broken, plus one magically come alive. Twelve is the number of the solar calendar (12 months), and the first day of spring, the vernal equinox, is determined by the sun's cycle. However, 13 is the number of months in the lunar calendar, and the date of Easter is determined both by the sun and the moon cycles. Seeing the significance of animals in this story, 13 is the more interesting - Joseph Campbell comments in his book, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, that in ancient cultures, the cycle of the moon was frequently used as the calendar by societies which relied on herding animals because it was more significant to the mating/birthing cycle. This is true of the ancient Hebrews, which lead to the lunar Jewish calendar, which in turn affected the date of Easter due to the relationship with the Jewish festival of Passover.

Just as the Easter story is one of a great miracle, Babushka finds many things full of wonder. The book is rhythmic in her refrain, "A miracle!" She shows a depth, a groundedness to the world, which is at the same time willing to be amazed. She lacks the detached arrogance that we sometimes take on in modern society. Are her miracles simple, or can we stop and see that, yes, truly these are miracles?

• Hungry caribou willing to come to Babushka to feed - "A miracle... These wild things have found their way to me."
• A goose who lays eggs brilliant in color - "A miracle!"
• Having just the right number of beautiful eggs appear to replace those she had lost - "A miracle has replaced the eggs that were broken."
• A goose who is such a companion to Babushka through the winter - "I shall sorely miss you, but you are a wild thing... and a miracle sent you to me. It would not be right to ask you to stay here with me forever."
• Caribou mothers with their newborn calves - "A miracle... New little lives... a miracle."
• A gosling born from a mother seemingly without a father - "All a miracle."

These are a mix of the magical and the explainable - but no less a miracle. New life is miraculous, nature amazes us with how things are created anew. If we saw all of our blessings as surprises, we could see life as full of joy and beauty as this wise old woman.


Check out other nature books on the References page.

Simple is Beautiful, Change is Uncomfortable

We have a stand of decorative grass that we view out our kitchen window at every meal. It's quite tall - 8 or 9 feet I'd guess. Through the fall and winter, you can see the sunrise behind its tall seedheads, and in the late winter, little birds come to eat the seeds, bending the stalks sideways with their weight. Now that spring is here, the time has come to trim it back to a shorn clump to encourage it to grow again this year.

I was outside with the trimmers, starting by clipping the curves of grass at the bottom. My little daughter runs across the yard to talk to me: "Mom! Don't cut that!!"

"Why?"

"That's my field!"

I'm with her on this. This grass is so grand, it draws the eye. It goes from green in summer to red then purple then orange in autumn, to yellow and pale straw in winter. And the way it waves in the wind, and looks when snow covered... I should take more pictures of it. But, it's spring, and grass needs to be cut to grow best, and someone who knows gardening better than I has told me that it needs to be done before the green shoots appear, so the time is now.

But there is sadness in letting go of something beautiful and comforting. I know that it will come back, even better, but I also know that it will be some time before the big seed stalks show again. I'm cutting it back in faith that that time will come again.

Today's Nature Lesson

Nature doesn't play favorites or allow things to stay pleasant or comfortable or static. Nature makes change, constant change. When the time is right for the change to happen, it happens, usually right under our noses. As parents we see it in our kids, but we still go through shock at times when change comes to us. When we push it away, it gets pent up, growing, growing against its bounds, until at last the tension is too much and we get the "cosmic two-by-four". I am working to create change and be open, but even still it is hard work. If I can let nature teach us how to look, how to watch, how to see those tiny, incremental adjustments that happen in me each day, maybe the newness that is trying to get out will open softly, like a flower, beautifully blossom.

Nature, Teach Me What You Will

Here begins a year-long experiment to find ways each week for me and my family connect to nature and the earth around us.

Our daily lives easily becomes so abstracted that we need conscious intention to remember the "realness", the preciousness, and the amazement of living in the physical world. I want to teach my children how important this is, but am I preaching or living it? This blog will keep me honest.

Grounding, Compost, and Collections

Today was a restless day inside - the kids' moods were up and down, and everyone's energy was low. After attempting an impromptu short nap, it was clear from our tempers that we needed a change of scenery. Out to the backyard to feed the compost pile and have some sunshine time.

What is it about the outdoors that completely shifts our outlook? Within minutes, the kids were calm and happy, quickly ramping to excited. I admit it took me longer to lose my funk, but then that's the problem with being a grown-up - we're not really "here" most of the time.

We were lucky to have a warm day - no jackets necessary in the sun - and no wind. It's still mostly brown everywhere, but the trees have tiny closed buds on their branches and the crocuses are blooming, the daffodils starting to pop up. But in truth, though the sun helped, I think it was the ground that made the most difference.

Grounding

My daughter's first reaction was to start picking up rocks and sticks and grass. (She was pulling it out, but hey, it really stands out when most things are brown.) Immediate and physical - real skin contact with the outside. It turns out this physical touching is incredibly significant. According to this researched article, there is scientific basis for why our bodies relax when we touch the earth:

It is known that the Earth maintains a negative electrical potential on its surface. When you are in direct contact with the ground (walking, sitting, or laying down on the earth’s surface) the earth’s electrons are conducted to your body, bringing it to the same electrical potential as the earth. Living in direct contact with the earth grounds your body...  

The Earth is a natural source of electrons and subtle electrical fields, which are essential for proper functioning of our immune systems, circulation, synchronization of biorhythms and other physiological processes and may actually be the most effective, essential, least expensive, and easiest to attain antioxidant.

Taking several deep breaths, centering on our breathing as in meditation, or visualizing "roots" going into the ground are other ways to bring us back to the here and now. It moves our energy out of the airy mental realm and back down into our bodies and the ground we stand on.

Compost

For me, it was the compost pile that brought me back to myself. I unabashedly love compost. There is something absolutely magical about nature turning food scraps and garden waste into beautiful dirt (the first time I found earthworms and other many-legged wigglies in my pile, I felt such pride). It mirrors to me all good that comes from change and from things that we cast off because we no longer need them. Today was no exception - our food scraps tucked into a side of the pile, and we used our saved dry leaves from the fall to carpet them over. Some of the leaves had gotten wet from the recent rain and started to break down some - with that heavenly smell that reminds me of fall.

Collections

It's exciting to see your kids connect to the earth and learn from nature without needing any prompting from you. The older one loves PBS's Dinosaur Train and she's latched onto the idea of creating a nature collection just like Don. She has a little plastic egg carton to store little berries, rocks, and other finds and treasures to look at and play with again and again. The best free toys you can imagine. Joining the ranks today: "Piggy", a little pink granite pebble.

Today's Nature Lesson

Touch the earth. Love the things you can't really own - the process of change, ground under your feet, rocks in your hands. Remember to breathe and come back to where you are. And for all that, I say, "Thank you!"