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!)
Support Our 365 Day Project by making a $5.00 Donation
(That’s less than 42 cents a month)
Did you miss days or don’t want to worry about missing days? Would you like a keepsake book so you can use this program over and over even when we take each post offline after two weeks?
Buy all 365 Days for only $35.00
(That’s less than $3.00 a month)
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-Six
Inner Work Meditation (Heart): In all my years of taking photos and meeting photographers the one subject I hear talked about the most is the “ideal lighting”. Photographers can spend days seeking out the “ideal lighting” for a photo and will sometimes avoid taking photos if the lighting is not “ideal”. But as we have already learned in this journey – there are many different kinds of lighting and “ideal” is not the lighting but what you do with it. If you want a dark subject to stand out backlighting will not be a good choice. However, for a photo of a flower, backlighting is “ideal”. Take ten minutes today to meditate on something you are seeking to be “ideal”. Are you seeking the “ideal rhythm” to move forward with your homeschooling day? Are you seeking the “ideal organized desk” to get started on that book you want to write? Are you seeking an “ideal mood” to start your studies? Take one of these examples and consider what would happen if you stopped waiting for the “ideal” and just “did it” now.
To expand on this idea even more you can check out the series Organization and the Temperaments to discover what the ideal schedule is for yourself. Discovering this can often help you just “do it” more often.
Nature Walk Idea (Head): As spring plants start to emerge you can start learning how to identify many of these newly emerging plants. Some plants, especially ones that bloom in spring, are ideal to identify this time of year . Your nature walk assignment today is to choose one plant you are unfamiliar with, take a picture of it and then identify it. If you pick a sample to take home instead make sure that there are plenty of the plant around and that you are not depleting the plant in the wild. Also make sure you do not pull up the plant from the root or take too much of it. At the same time you need to take enough of the plant that you will be able to identify it. Take note of how tall it was in the wild as this is often something you will need to know. There are no restrictions on this task today – you can choose a flower, a tree, or a bush. If you would like to expand this day into a lesson block you can see our Herbal Identification Lesson Block HERE.
Photography Notes (Hands): This year we will do a lot of work with light. However, as with all skills, it is best to focus on one aspect of the new skill at a time. Light in photography is a big subject so we will be doing many different exercises with light. Earlier in this series we did an exercise with the observation of light, how light effects colors and how light can create reflections. Today we will do an exercise with backlight. If it is raining where you are today or very dreary then bring a bright flashlight with you to create the effect yourself. If you do have natural light today look for places where something is backlit. Often we notice backlight when it darkens a subject we don’t want to be dark. However, sometimes backlight can be a good thing. Backlight can create a silhouette against the sunrise and sometimes it can even highlight the beauty of a subject, like in the case of this flower in the photo I shared today. The backlight helps bring out the color and makes it glow. Your assignment today is to take a photo using backlighting.
Verse: Spring Beacon
Copyright Kristie Burns
I dig my roots into the dry ground
Drag my branches without a sound
Droop my head, nothing to see
Animus absentee
Abruptly aroused
From spirit drowsed
Spring’s lantern
Single
Bloom
*A Nonet is a nine line poem, with the first line containing nine syllables, the next eight, so on until the last line has one syllable. Nonets can be written about any subject, and rhyming is optional.
*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.
Leave a Reply