A connection to place

I think we’ve all known special places that have deep meaning for us personally.

 Maybe we don’t always recognize it at the time.  There are several natural places that are special to me, but those with the deepest roots are woven from my childhood memories.  Colors and shapes, smells and sounds, and textures like the tactile velvet of new buds or flaking limestone. 

 The memories stay vivid and strong – some more so, some less.  Most of them comforting, but some, not so much.   They speak of my relationships with nature.  They are both known and unknown, some barely lurking within my subconscious.  What I remember most are not the events, but the feelings those connections gave me.

 

Maple leaves, owl feather, hickory nuts, and wild grape.

This is a small nature sketch done years ago, somewhere in the mid-1980s, of things collected on a walk through Iowa woods.  It was mid-autumn, and the season gave me treasures and a near infinity of browns and buff, with splashes of red and yellow.  Along the trail: leaves on limb and ground, sticks and branches and trunks and bark, seeds and frost-bitten fruits, empty acorn caps and sometimes a glimpse of gritty green. 

 The woods I rambled in are located in upper northeast Iowa, along a limestone ridge and bluff above a river.   It is a place of meditation, of quietness threaded with birdsong.   This is also a connection to a point in time.  Fall is a favorite season of mine; it feels like an important transition somehow, and I sometimes catch my breath waiting for the next thing to come.

It feels like a time to let life unwind, and a place to rest and heal. 

A sacred place.

 

Media:
Paper - unknown mass-produced watercolor paper pad, about 8x10"
Watercolor paint, probably Grumbacher and/or Winsor & Newton
     (the colors still surprisingly bright after almost 40 years)
Craft brushes
# 2 Pencil

Collections: the joy of small things in my nature journals

Sandstone rocks, Red Rock Canyon, Nevada

There is a magic in the small things of life.  All my life I have been a collector of bits and pieces of nature. 

 I’ve had soda crates filled with rocks under my bed, nests and feathers tucked into a shoebox, bits of leaves and flowers pressed into books, shells and driftwood in plastic tubs.  My parents begged me to leave the rocks behind when we moved.  How could I?  They were from places visited and each one held a memory – my own little Cabinets of Curiosities.

I love the tiny pieces of life that tell a story of the world around me. It might be a leaf; it might be an acorn cracked by a squirrel.  It might be a broken shell, maybe be a piece of wave-washed coral.  Altogether, these parts tell a whole story.

Things from my yard, Naples, Florida

I do my collecting in images now.  The act of drawing or painting an assortment of natural objects brings me joy.  Each page is a cabinet of curiosity, and each natural object relates to the other.  

 

What is it about humans that drives us to collect, store, and display these bits of the natural world?  I’ve only collected found objects, but there are big game hunters and orchid collectors and pot hunters who are not so benign.  I’ve often wondered at the motivation to gather these items.  What deeper meaning drives this behavior?  How does this shape our relationship to Nature?  

For me, it's because they tell of my travels and I want to revisit that story.   They represent discarded remnants (a fallen nest), or clues of a past meal (the cracked acorn), or a story of the passage of time (a fossil shell).  These are important things.  They are treasures, and they hold magic.  The magic is in the life that went before, and the story told now. 

On your next hike or visit to the ocean or park, look for those small pieces of nature – let them fill your life with that same magic of discovery that fills every joyful five-year-old child.   Let their story connect to yours.  These connections can fill us with humility, wonder, and awe of the vibrancy of life, until we are filled and overflowing, then to share our story.

Things from along the Upper Iowa River prairie bottom
Decorah, Iowa

Things from my yard, Naples, Florida

Things from the shore, Gulf of Mexico
Naples, Florida