Get Out!

During these warm months of summer, I encourage you to get out doors and develop a new, beneficial habit for your life.  The rewards of being in the out of doors are great in a variety of ways. Neuroscience research shows wonderful impacts on our cognitive abilities, stress levels, emotions, and overall health that being in the world of nature brings.  

To enhance your outdoor experience, I urge you to take up nature journaling.  I have provided you with examples of pages from my own sketchbooks.  When you journal what you are seeing, hearing, and feeling, you embed the experience so much deeper into your memory in ways that just taking a photo will not attain.  

A number of helpful resources exist to help you along the path to nature journaling.  Here are a few:

*  Keeping a Nature Journal:  Discover a Whole New Way of Seeing the World Around You
by Clare Walker Leslie and Charles E. Roth

*The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling
by John Muir Laws

When nature journaling, some things you may want to record are:
date
place 
time
temperature
cloud pattern/sky
wind direction
what do you hear
what do you see
several thumbnail sketches of the flora, fauna, and landscape

These sketches are not to be major art productions.  Do not feel the pressure of having to produce a masterpiece.  These are just aids to help you remember what you saw and to look more closely at what you might miss if you were not observing carefully in order to depict an object.  Sometimes your time to nature journal will have to be quick and on the go.  Even then you can try to capture 5 things briefly in little thumbnails.  

  

Children will catch the vision along with you as you romp the countryside and develop their perceptions, wonder, curiosity, and drawing skills.

Being outdoors heightens our senses and deepens our wonder.  We apreciate life on a grander scale.  An amazing, brave Englishwoman, Isabella L. Bird, wrote this piece in her fascinating book, A Lady's LIfe in the Rocky Mountains:

Before long a carnival of colour began which I can only describe as delirious, intoxicating, a hardly bearable joy, a tender anguish, an indescribable yearning, an unearthly music, rich in

love and worship.  It lasted considerably more than an hour...

Isabella wrote this to describe her experience traveling through the High Sierras of California.  If you are a person of faith, being out in creation leads to a grand sense of worship for the Creator God Who made all that exists.  The shepherd King David composed many chapters in the Psalms exulting in God's works and wonders:  

The heavens declare the glory of God;

the skies proclaim the work of His hands.

Psalm 19:1

O Lord, our Lord, 

how majestic is Your name in all the earth!...

When I consider Your heavens, 

the work of Your fingers, 

the moon and the stars,

which You have set in place,

what is man that You are mindful of him,

the son of man that You care for him?
Psalm 8

I like how David expressed his observations in the word "consider".  That involves taking time to ponder and to contemplate what one is seeing, to go deeper with one's thoughts.  Keeping a nature journal can be a valuable asset to considering God's creation and enhancing your worship of the Creator.

Here's a song, "Morning Has Broken", sung by Cat Stevens which celebrates the exuberance felt in creation:

Live bravely and beautifully!