Nature Journaling Workshop

Dear Journalers,

Our time together on September 19, 2021 went by all too quickly. Perhaps you’d like to do more with the digital nature journal we talked about at the Schoodic Education and Research Center in Winter Harbor, Maine. These prompts and exercises are available here until Dec 31, 2021, just for you. Use them in any way you like. I appreciate if you keep my name with them: authored by Alison C. Dibble.

PROMPTS

Prompt 1, First Thing.  Dress for the weather, grab your camera, quiet your mind, and step out your door. The very first thing you see or hear that you consider to be “nature”, record that. If it’s too hard to photograph, then make a brief note and go on to something you can record in your camera.

Prompt 2, Through a Child’s Eyes. Find a young buddy and go for a walk in the park or anywhere that has some (relatively) natural surroundings. What does the child notice? Emphasize that in your journal today.

Prompt 3, For the Birds. It can be challenging to photograph birds with a cell phone camera, but see what you can do. With practice you can get a few photos that might surprise you with their clarity and freshness. Try for birds doing something, not just sitting there. Hint: bring some stale bread along and go to the local duck pond.

Prompt 4, How Tiny Can You Get?. Macrophotography, or close-ups, can have so many pleasing results. You may need a tripod (can be small, even a beanbag) or brace your hand while activating the shutter. How close can you get without blurring? Take some time to explore your camera (even on the cell phone) and get close-ups of many kinds of subjects, from the gravel in the driveway, to the leaves of your houseplants, to the fruit in a bowl, to your shell collection. Photograph insects, dead wood, moss, and lichens. See what you can make of this. Then go through your photos and think about what you like, and why. Take one or more of your photos to the next level…feature the photo in a page in your digital journal and write about it.

Prompt 5, Pure Emotion. Think of an emotion, whether good or bad (joy, contentment, anger, frustration, etc.). Choose one emotion that you will seek to illustrate with a photo. Then set out to take that photo. This is a big challenge! You might have to take many, many pictures to achieve this to your satisfaction. Once you get started, though, I predict that you will find ways to illustrate emotion in many unlikely places, and you will heighten your sensitivity to emotion in the world around you. Evaluate your own efforts, and keep trying.

EXERCISES

Exercise 1. Nature Journaling is a Muscle.  Just as we must exercise our bodies to remain strong and flexible, so, too, we gain proficiency in nature journaling by practicing a lot. Can you find time every day to do just one page? You will become more facile with the technology (camera to laptop, or cell phone to laptop, or what-have-you in your setup) if you work with it regularly. Put a note on the refrigerator if you like, “Did you work in your Nature Journal today?”. After about three days of faithful effort, this may become a habit and won’t be as hard to fit into the schedule.

Exercise 2. Deeper and Deeper.  After working with your nature journal for some time, you might find yourself wanting to know much more about something that you have been observing. Let’s say, it’s a Ruddy turnstone (migratory shorebird) that you happened to spot while visiting the coast during fall migration. You might enter a research phase, and go to the library or online to find additional resources. The material you may gather would perhaps be too big to fit in a typical nature journal. This is where the digital journal is so handy; you can save articles as pdfs, and save your notes, and find many photos that will help you satisfy your curiosity. For this exercise, PICK SOMETHING that intrigues you and research it. Keep going deeper and see where you can get with this before you run out of (a) patience, (b) interest, or (c) resources!

Exercise 3. Scaling Up. The digital journal is a start toward something. What? That’s up to you. For me, it’s toward a painting, but it could be a poem, an essay, a meditation, a series of sketches, a short story. Find one of your favorite entries in your own digital journal and choose what you will do to scale it up into something else. Develop something you already started, perhaps a long time ago, like a set of poems. Or you might push yourself into new territory, and be so glad that you did.

Exercise 4. Sharing and Caring.  Mostly your digital journal is for you. But you might rethink that a little bit. Who would be interested in seeing one of your pages? Before you share, be sure to acknowledge your sources if you are using someone else’s information. While you might be tempted to post some part of your nature journal in social media or a web site, it’s a good idea to consider all the angles before you hit “Send”, “Submit” or “Publish”. Will you wish you had kept your privacy? Might someone else get hurt from your action (e.g., revealing where a fox den is located)? Caution is one thing, but the world needs GOOD content on the internet, and wider sharing might be right for you. Or print out your page and share it as hard copy with someone who might not be computer-enabled.

Exercise 5. Where From Here?  To make your nature journal all the more special, consider how far you might go with this. You can keep it just for you, and look at it later to see how far you have come. That is a great way to go! There some other possibilities: (a) your journal as a set of examples for teaching others; (b) your journal as the focus for a book you will write, or a web page you will develop; (c) your journal as part of the record of a conservation area (e.g., a park, a land trust property), printed, bound and contributed to the offices of that area or to a local library. There are other ways you could go, it’s up to you. The sky is the limit.

Wishing you good luck and enjoyment as you fill your pages!

Your friend,

Alison

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Thank you, and have fun writing fiction.

A. D. Morel

— Manna is everywhere! —