Month: January 2024

The Four of Us

/ Michael Smith / 2 Comments
New Year’s Eve, 2022, at LBJ National Grasslands (Michael, Jo, Meghan & Carly)

Sometimes people come into your life and, if you are really lucky, they become permanently and inextricably part of who you are. For Jo and me, over the last five years or so Meghan and Carly have become family.

Meghan and I met in July of 2019 at what was then Southwest Nature Preserve in Arlington. Meghan brought her love and knowledge of spiders and other invertebrates, along with a desire to learn more about herps. I brought my residual bit of arachnophobia and all those years of experience with reptiles and amphibians. For both of us, nature was deeply ingrained.

Before the end of the year, we decided to do a book together, with me as author and her as photographer. It would be one that would combine a mindfulness-based way of being in nature with descriptions of the natural history of places across the state. Let me quote from the Acknowledgements in the book:

Without Meghan Cassidy’s energy and enthusiasm in the field, her friendship and encouragement, and especially her skill at seeing the potential for a really good photograph and capturing it in the field, this book wouldn’t have happened. At some later date, when we sat at a computer deciding which photos really worked, she was right every time. Meghan was the ideal companion for adventures such as the late-night police chase in the East Texas forests that nearly ran us off the road, or the sudden storm that battered the cabin on the hillside in the Trans-Pecos.

Mindfulness in Texas Nature (expected later this year)
Meghan, taking photos for the book at Sea Rim State Park

I remember when Meghan first told me about Carly and how wonderful she was. As in most things, Meghan was right. Carly’s knowledge of birds and ecology is matched by a quiet wisdom and insight (see my comments about our 2021 trip, “Grief and Hope on the Rolling Plains“). And, like Meghan, she is just a deeply good person.

Meghan and Carly at LBJ National Grasslands

Meanwhile the travels for the book continued, with time for mindful walking and sitting as well as finding and photographing many examples of Texas wildlife and wild places. On other occasions I visited prairies with Meghan and Carly and we hung out at our beloved LBJ National Grasslands.

Black-tailed rattlesnake in the Trans-Pecos
While photographing green tree frogs
Night herping at LBJ Grasslands
On a prairie visit
A Great Plains ratsnake at LBJ Grasslands

Jo may not have been in the field so much of the time, but she joined us when she could, and dinners and games at each of our homes have been wonderful for the four of us. We’ve been through hard things together, too, and we’ll always be there for each other.

Jo
Meghan with our granddaughter Lilly

And circumstances change, though our closeness with each other will not. A job change means that Meghan and Carly are moving to Minnesota, leaving in the next couple of days. Two in Texas and two practically in Canada, the four of us will be making frequent use of FaceTime and similar technologies to stay virtually together.

It will be a long drive, so stay safe. I keep being reminded of “The Four of Us,” John Sebastian’s wonderful extended song about two couples who “drew a smile across the states” and took a road trip across the U.S. In this case one beloved couple.

So here’s a little travelling song
Of talk that comes from dusk till dawn
So go and see and pass it on
Lest you miss it, lest it’s gone
Every lover keep your driver
on the road and laughing

The Four of Us (1971), John Sebastian

When People Disappoint, the Preserve Does Not

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

Today in a walk in an urban preserve, what nature offered was a stark contrast to what many humans offered. Nature offered examples of beauty and harmony. Humans, not so much today. I am grateful for nature’s gifts this afternoon, and I’m hoping for all of us to make more progress toward an attentive and respectful relationship with nature (and with other people).

A red admiral rests for a moment

Butterflies and dragonflies are still active at the preserve. A hard freeze is just days away, and these insects bring their beauty and their skillful flight as if today’s warmth was the only reality. They’re right – today, this day right now is the only reality and they were making full use of it.

A young juniper growing in the shelter of an oak tree’s trunk brought to mind the harmony and tolerance that humans sometimes fail to have. I’m aware that the oak did not invite the juniper, and that the oak will take water, nutrients, and sunlight without much regard for its small neighbor. Regardless of intentions, they grew side by side and appear to be thriving.

Juniper, sheltering beside a blackjack oak

Every winter, a little below the crown of the hill, standing cypress begins to grow. They first emerge as feathery green rosettes, and they grow through the winter and spring. Eventually they produce a spike of the most beautiful red flowers before dying back later in the year. When everything else seems doubtful, standing cypress won’t let you down.

A new standing cypress

Maybe standing cypress isn’t high on everyone’s list of priorities. We need an affordable place to live, and we need people who are willing to set aside their momentary impulses and follow rules for the good of the community. Next to that, being able to count on a plant’s annual re-emergence might not seem like much. But the more other things fall apart, the more valuable seem the parts of the world that are dependable.

Silhouettes

I sat on a boulder in the warm sunshine and wrote a little in the journal. The temperature had reached the middle 60s in the shade, and sitting there in a t-shirt, the radiant sun felt great. Then it was down the trail to the big pond. There were a few places where some leaves still held on to some color, and the sun shining through them was like nature’s stained glass.

Another gift from the afternoon sun – light in the tops of the grasses

I ended up at one of the other ponds, watching the low sun light up the trees at the end of the day. It was a time of day that felt quiet. I had not heard any birds (with my ears or with the Merlin app) during my walk, and no turtles were basking at the pond. The water was still, and everything seemed hushed. Was the preserve ready for a rest? I know that communities of invertebrates, fish, and other animals continue their activities into the night. I also know that the one who was ready for a rest, after unleashed dogs, unruly dogs, and dirt bikes that have no business in a preserve, was me. The peace of a quiet pond was a welcome end to my walk.

Kids in Nature – Mindfully

/ Michael Smith / Leave a comment

I will be focusing more time on inviting others to some semi-wild place and experiencing it mindfully, doing some nature journaling, and learning a little about the plants and animals that live there. I’ve led nature walks before (with the LBJ Grasslands Project, for example), but these outings will more explicitly focus on mindfulness and nature journaling. If you are reading this in the North Texas area and would like to join me, please use the Contact page to send me an inquiry. At this point there is no fee, but I’ll check the status of the “tip jar” at this website in case anyone would like to contribute! Some of these outings may be more for adults, but some will be for families with kids at least ten years old or older.

Getting children out to experience nature mindfully involves their being less “somewhere else” and more “right here, now.” Somewhere else is thinking about something that happened this morning or hoping you can do something tonight, wishing your friend was here with you, and imagining how Batman could knock that tree down. Being right here is noticing the shapes of clouds, feeling how the ground feels under your feet, listening to a frog call, and recognizing prickly pear cactus and walking around rather than through it. Mindfulness involves paying attention to the present moment, without judging it as good or bad and without wishing it was different. 

Some kids may like the idea of taking a walk in which we will see everything more clearly, hear more things, notice smells, and touch a few things to see how they feel. I might explain to them that we will “turn down the background noise” of our thinking and talking while on the walk, so that we can experience the walk more fully. I will mention that this is not always easy for any of us. Our brain wants to turn the volume back up, and that’s normal, it’s what brains do. So when we notice that we’re thinking about something else, we just let the thought go, let it float away, and bring our attention back to what is happening now. We may have to do that over and over, and that’s OK.

Some kids may be used to blasting through a nature walk while talking to friends. If a nature walk seems unfamiliar or boring, they may be escaping by thinking of other things and going through the walk on autopilot. The job of a teacher or parent is to invite them in and make it seem worth a try. One way to do that is with nature games that provide a little structure for paying attention to the things around them. Or it might add interest to offer some natural history information (“That bird over there is getting ready to fly to South America!” “That rock is the silt and seashells from a beach where dinosaurs walked”). We may want to alternate periods of quiet attention with times when kids talk with each other and with us.

A nature journal is your own personal story, in words and pictures, of places you visited and things you experienced. You write a little and maybe draw a few pictures in a blank book or notebook – nothing fancy is needed. The idea is to stop and think about what you’re experiencing and preserve a little bit of it on paper. For some people, an entry might be mostly contain information about the place, the weather that day, and seeing a kingfisher fly over the pond. Someone else might write a poem about sun reflected on the water and the flight of that kingfisher, or maybe they would just draw the bird with a few notes about seeing it. There’s more than one way to keep a nature journal.

The only way I know to do this with kids is to have a responsible adult (family member or family friend) who brings the child and stays with us. It really cannot be a drop-off, but we would be happy for the adults to join in the activities. The ideal group, with kids or adults, is small – perhaps five or six. A small group just seems quieter, more focused, and better able to get to know each other, and so I will limit the group size.

What is my background for doing this? I have been licensed as a Psychological Associate for over 38 years and have led walks in nature for adults and kids. I’ve written two books about reptiles and amphibians and, most recently, a book about mindfulness in nature.

We’ll plan a walk when we are edging toward spring and have some sunny, warm-ish days. I will either use urban preserves and parks like Fort Worth Nature Center & Refuge, Tandy Hills Natural Area, or Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve, or places that are a little bigger and away from the city like LBJ National Grasslands. I hope you can join us!

A New Year: Needing Nature’s Continuity

/ Michael Smith / 2 Comments

We have this urge to mark the end of the old year and welcome the new one, so we gather to wish each other a happy New Year. We think about the coming year as a new beginning. Sometimes we want to try for a new beginning for ourselves, with new year’s resolutions to start doing this or to do less of that. Midnight on December 31 marks a change, for good or ill (mostly for good; it feels like a bad omen to even consider that it could be a change for the worse). Another year older, another chance, another spring.

LBJ National Grasslands, in Unit 29, on the last day of 2023

But spring is months away and our transition to 2024 is completely arbitrary, unless you consider that it’s pretty close to the winter solstice when everything really does begin to change, in ever so gradual degrees toward greater light and warmth. Nevertheless, yesterday was the end of 2023, and among some members of my nature tribe the right way to mark the occasion was to walk the woods and prairies one last time.

Alaina, Sheryl, and Jake met me at LBJ National Grasslands under a warming sun with scattered clouds. It is a familiar and welcoming place, and if we needed reassurance that some good things can be counted on to stay consistent despite the turning of the year, this was it. We did not talk about it, but I expect that this dependability of nature is part of the appeal of a walk here on New Year’s Eve. Many of us are ambivalent about change, considering what we have been through in recent years. The pandemic, a worsening climate crisis, the creep toward fascism in many places across the world; these things make the woodlands and prairies more precious than ever. The cycles of growth, flowering, the shedding of leaves and winter dormancy make up a background of dependability. That, and the love that truly close friends and family have for each other, keep us going when everything else seems to be falling apart.

Alaina and Sheryl

The earth tones of the prairies have become quite “earthy” and the straw and sienna colors have faded, but there was still some warm brown in the woods. And the liberal scattering of junipers adds some touches of green, so it was hardly a colorless winter scene. When you add the ponds with reflective water and surrounding bare trees, the grasslands in winter have a visual beauty beyond compare. Spring and summer are also lovely, just in a different way. The Western Cross Timbers is an amazing gift that every season makes into something new and wonderful.

There is life in every season. We saw a few dragonflies, and I mentioned to my friends that I believe seeing a dragonfly on the last day of the year should be a sign of good luck. Spread the word – let’s make a “lucky dragonfly” tradition and invite urban folks into a new little connection to the natural world. These insects are already associated with good luck in some Asian and Native American traditions, so it shouldn’t be a stretch.

A common buckeye

We also saw some butterflies. We often see them deep into the winter if the day is sunny and has some warmth. They flutter along and bring extra movement and color to the day. One of them was a buckeye, a species with colorful round “eye spots” on their orange, brown, and white wings.

Our walk helped end 2023 in a good way, and we are ready to carry that through into the new year. Here’s to everyone having a year with beauty and wonder, surrounded by those you love (even if from a long distance*) and filled with empathy, compassion – and healing whenever that may be needed. Happy New Year!

* Looking at you, Meghan and Carly!