Good morning all. My name is James Todd, and I am a Nature Journal Educator through the Wild Wonder Foundation of John Muir Laws. Please check out the Wild Wonder web page for more information.
This page will be a place for occasionally posting my journal pages and talking about the observations and experiences I have as I practice Nature Journaling, mostly in Indiana, but other places too, and announcing activities for our nature journal outings. I hope I figure out how to invite you to post your pages here too, although I am not very adept at using Substack yet.
I hope to build a community of people who are interested in nature. Specifically protecting, preserving, and restoring our natural environment in Indiana, and everywhere we find ourselves. My overall goal is to save the world. That is an audacious statement, and I am not foolish enough to think that I can do that, but I enjoy spending my time with other people who also want to save the world, so if you are here I will assume that you feel the same.
Henry David Thoreau made a famous statement: “In wildness will be the preservation of the world”. I like to make a distinction between “wildness” and “wilderness”. Wilderness is a place you go to; wildness is a state of mind. I am not the first to make that statement. Gary Snyder in “the Practice of the Wild” makes that assertion, and I first heard it from my late zen teacher John Daido Loori. But it has stuck with me over the years. Our nature is wildness. We have it inside of us, it is living on our skin, it is present in our homes and everywhere we go on our trip around this universe. Wilderness is a place we carry our wildness to, and we meet it when we get there, wherever “there” happens to be.
The practice of Nature Journaling is (paraphrasing John Muir Laws) “to record and collect our observations, thoughts, and experiences in nature, using words, pictures, and numbers, onto a page in a notebook”. In this space we will share our nature journals with each other.
What this space is not is a place for politics, flame wars, or echo chambers. So I will never post a political message, and I ask the same of you. Let this be a breath of fresh air in the midst of the cloud of poison we often find ourselves breathing.
I can’t promise to post here every day. I just want to have a public place to share my pages, and hopefully a place where you can share yours. I think it is a good idea to be able to announce nature journaling opportunities for us to spend some time together and share our experiences. I will take suggestions for places to go, and maybe we can figure out a regular day and time to meet. I like Holiday Park a lot, so maybe there can be a monthly gathering there. Right now Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursday afternoons work best for me, or maybe one Sunday of the month is best.
Yesterday, March 2, our first outing happened at Oliver’s Woods in Indianapolis happened. We had a lovely day, cool and sunny. Here is a photo of the group, talking and showing our journals to each other after we had spent some time journaling outside:
Okay, that’s it for today. See you soon!
Well done, James. A perfect meditation in a lovely setting.