This series takes you through an entire year of our nature walks and is part of our non-profit project #Earthschooling365 at www.Earthschooling.org. The photos and posts in this series are all copyrighted. Please do not share or re-print them. Instead, share the link to this blog with your friends.
Along the way I will be sharing our favorite photo of the day, an inner work meditation for the day, photography assignment/tip for the day, nature walk theme for the day and a short verse for circle time (children) or meditation (teens/adults). We invite you to “walk along with us” this year, take some time to use the inner work meditation, be inspired by the nature walk theme of the day and perhaps even start a photo series of your own. To join the community on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram please tag your photos #Earthschooling365. To receive these inspirations in your e-mail inbox daily please subscribe to our blog alerts HERE. Don’t worry about missing days – you can join us as many days as you want this year!
Every day we will post one day. We will leave up 2 weeks of nature walks at a time. At the end of two weeks each nature walk will be transferred to the Lifetime Member’s Only Blog and will be accessible only to Lifetime Earthschooling Members. If you want to own the entire series without enrolling a an Earthschooling Lifetime Package Member you can purchase the entire series for only $35.00 (for the entire year!)
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You can start your journey any day. You do not have to follow our schedule. However, we will leave up the first week of the project all year so you can follow the steps to get started.
#Earthschooling365: Day Twenty-Two
Inner Work Meditation (Heart): As your senses open and you become more and more aware of all the unfamiliar sights on your “familiar” walk you may start to feel like an astronaut going to the moon. This thought struck me today. I had seen so many new things that I couldn’t believe I didn’t see them before. Had I really taken these walks so many times before? Is this really the place I lived in? It was simply doing this walks through a different lens that had changed the way I experienced them. Todays meditations to take the time to see something in your life through a different lens. Take ten minutes today to think about a person or a place in your life that is familiar. Renew and deepen your relationship with this person or place by using a different lens to see them through. You can focus on this practice for the entire day, but take some time during your inner work/meditation to think about how this might work. Will you take pictures of them? Draw a picture of them? Write about them? Write a poem about them? Pretend you are viewing them as a child, a friend or a parent? Look at them upside-down?
Nature Walk Idea (Head): Today your nature walk task is to pretend you are visiting from another planet. Pretend that you are going for a walk “on the moon”. You are an astronaut or an explorer who is one of the first to be seeing this new land. What do you see today through these eyes? Assume you know nothing of what a bird, a tree and a person are. For older teens and adults you can take this assignment a bit farther. What observations do you make in trying to categorize these things? What did you learn about human nature today as you attempted to see through “naive” eyes? Were you able to? Why or why not? What prevented you from really seeing things in an unknown form?
Express your observations with one of our writing lessons, Fifth Grade Writing Block, Sixth Grade Writing Block or Complete Language Arts Package.
Photography Notes (Hands): Sometimes we want to capture something about our walk but it is something you can’t take a picture of or draw. How does one take a picture of the wind? Or the smell of flowers? How does one take a picture of darkness? Today your assignment is to take a picture that represents something un-seen. In this photo of the woodpecker today you can see how his feathers are blowing in the wind as he sits atop an old tree stump. When you see the photo you might think, “it is a windy day” even though I was not able to take a picture of the wind. Today your assignment is to take a picture of the unseen.
Verse: Riddle of the Unseen
Copyright Kristie Burns
These poems have been created for many purposes – from early childhood circle time verses to inspirational or expressive. They vary from day to day so you may find the way you use them or enjoy them also varies.
He fluffs the woodpecker’s wing
Strokes the deer’s hide
Discourages the bee’s sting
Leaves the ducklings terrified
Causes the leaves to sing
Releases dandelion down to glide
Declares himself to be the king
All the puddles he has dried
As water droplets desperately cling
Answer: The Wind
*Riddle Poem: These are a fun genre of poem that describe something in rhyme (could be ABABABA… or any other rhyming scheme) without saying the name. The reader of the poem then needs to guess what you have written about.
*These poems have been created for many purposes – from early childhood circle time verses to inspirational or expressive. They vary from day to day so you may find the way you use them or enjoy them also varies. If you would like to set these poems to music consider our tutorial: Creating Your Ow Waldorf Verses or Finding Your Inner Voice.
Please send your friends to www.BEarthBlog.com so they can join in too!
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