Reasons to Keep a Nature Journal
Reasons to Keep a Nature Journal
✦As you seek to record natural objects, events, and landscapes, nature journaling cultivates the habit of noticing and an attention to detail. This rich awareness will be a source of joy and interest to you throughout your life. Even the smallest or most common objects offer beauty to the astute observer: in complexity, symmetry, scent, texture, or color.
✦Nature journaling provides a very personal medium through which to cultivate artistic and literary skills. It is an avenue of expression, a record of growth, a celebration of discovery and wonder.
✦Nature journaling sends you out-of-doors to enjoy nature and all its attending benefits: sunshine, fresh air, and light exercise. It is time away from the artificial to experience direct contact with God’s creation and the fundamentals of life and death.
✦Nature journaling increases knowledge of botany, zoology, and weather, not by dry textbooks but through personal observation; not by dull facts of a general species, but a familiarity with an individual in which you’ve invested your time and interest.
“I believe that natural history has lost much by the vague general treatment that is so common. What satisfaction would be derived from a ten-page sketch on the habits and customs of Man? How much more profitable it would be to devote that space tot he life and of some one great man. This is the principle I have endeavored to apply to my animals. The real personality of the individual, and his view of life are my theme, rather than the ways of the race in general, as viewed by a casual and hostile human eye.”
Wild Animals I Have Known, Ernest Thompson Seton, 1898
✦Nature journaling increases your intimacy and love for your locality, its flora and fauna, its landscape in every season. You will discover your backyard, exploring every nook and cranny, crawling in the grass to examine miniscule wildflowers, searching the treetops for an ebullient songster. In search of new subjects, you may find yourself visiting local and regional parks and gardens, perhaps meeting others also interested in natural history.
✦Nature journaling necessitates a slowing down, as you learn to observe and enjoy nature as it operates in real-life time. (Cruising nature videos can be very deceiving!) It does require focus, but following the marvelous veining of a leaf is a reposeful concentration.
✦As Thoreau came to realize, “Nature cannot satisfy the expectations it arouses.” C. S. Lewis would remind us that it is but a whisper, an intimation of the beauty, glory, and complete happiness found only in God. If you keep the eyes of your soul open as wide as your natural eyes when examining nature, you will find ample reason and opportunity to praise God.
Title Illustration: Shinnecock Hills (A View of Shinnecock), 1891. William Merritt Chase.
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ELISSA said...
What a lovely post! I received a beautiful notebook for Christmas that I plan on using as my nature journal. I haven’t kept one in quite a long time, so I’m looking forward to spring when there is more opportunity to observe things to record in a nature journal! (Though, to be sure, there have been many things lately I could have used it for, even in winter!)
Wednesday, February 10, 2010 02:01 PM
HANDMAIDEN said...
“‘Hear! Hear!’ screamed the jay from a neighboring tree, where I had heard a tittering for some time. ‘Winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel, if you know where to look for it.’” —Henry David Thoreau, 28 November 1858, journal entry
Thursday, February 11, 2010 09:44 AM
Tuesday, February 9, 2010