Happy New Year everyone! Thinking about what we do to mark New Year’s Eve and where it comes from, I’ve written a new Letter to Nature Kids. I hope you will have a look and share it with any kids who might want to have a look. (When you click the link it will download as a pdf)
Have a safe and happy New Year’s Eve. May we all have a good 2026; may the light return figuratively as well as literally.
I’m updating the website, and I hope you’ll find the changes useful. The primary change is the addition of a page for my “online book,” Naturalists and Nature Kids in North Texas. I want to write about what naturalists do, how to observe, practice mindfulness, keep a nature journal, and how to encourage and guide kids toward a love for and an interest in nature. I also wanted to include sections that describe these things in practice, experiencing the woods and prairies of North Texas. I hope you will have a look at this work in progress at the Online Book page.
It really is a work in progress, and if you read some of the chapters or journal entries, I would be very grateful if you would share any comments about them. Could Naturalists and Nature Kids join my other in-print books? I don’t know at this point, but for now I offer the completed sections and hope that you will like them.
“And now,” cried Max, “let the wild rumpus start!”
― Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are
This week I met several groups of kids in a little patch of wildness at their school, looking for the various ways that plants make seeds, or, with younger ones, playing a game of “Food Chain” (no one was eaten, even during the wild rumpus). The kids know the place well, and many of them have explored the Ranger Circle, the Dark Forest, Maria’s Meadow, and other spots many times over several years at the private school.
My role is to channel some of their energy into new forms of discovery and understanding of what lives there. I can be a counterweight to a child’s fantasy about “poisonous” spiders or aggressive snakes, trying to replace such ideas with realistic caution and a sense that, overall, nature here is a safe place. I can invite them to think in new ways about animals in nature.
For example, the third and fourth graders know a lot of animals, but their knowledge of what the animal eats – and in turn what eats it – is limited. And so, in the “Food Chain” game, when we name one of the animals that the kids have seen there, a child who can name that critter’s predator or prey comes over to the “naturalist’s corner” and we ask about the next animal, until all the kids have come over to the naturalist’s corner.
But running around and exploring is part of it. When I sent the older kids out in groups of three or four, they sprang into the woods and fields as if shot from a slingshot. They scoured the place and came up with lots of wonderful examples of seeds. There were huge bur oak acorns with the stiff, curly fringe around the acorn cup. They found the small, dried pods of the partridge pea that was flowering just a couple of months ago. They noticed all the yellow, fleshy berries of horse nettle that we had talked about on an earlier outing. Yes, they look a little like tiny tomatoes, and they are even related (but poisonous). There were mimosa pods and the dark blue berries of privet, and I mentioned how invasive and destructive privet is in a place like this. They found seed heads of Indian grass and a couple of other grasses. One girl brought a sprig of juniper, so I mentioned that this species has separate male and female trees (and the sprig with the yellowish tips was from a male plant).
The younger kids were ready to run well before I was able to tell them what they should do. They would have been delighted to simply run. There was a lot of “wait, sit back down – no, you’ve got to stay with your group.” The instructions were as short as I could make them. “This group goes to this area, your group goes this way … and look for animals or signs that the animal was there, like a bird nest.” Then I sent them out. I might as well have said, “Let the wild rumpus start.” And kids started coming to me in excitement, “We found a bird nest! Also a beaver nest!” I had to see what this last really was, and they led me to some piled up brush someone had cut. That’s fine; the important thing was excitement about finding things. A spider web. A hole or burrow of some kind (armadillos had been digging in various spots). A dragonfly.
The trick which I do not claim to have mastered is to allow and even join a bit of wild rumpus while keeping things structured enough to accomplish what we set out to do. Some kids are quieter and are already locked in on the goal, and usually they bring a good bit of knowledge to the activity. For other kids, nature study is not on their “to do” list, but running and discharging energy is. I think that we won’t get anywhere without some kind of curiosity and joy, so I would never turn any of this into “nature boot camp.” Working with groups of kids gives me additional appreciation for what teachers do (and they do it every day, not occasionally as a volunteer).
But it’s great to hear a kid say they look forward to these outings, or ask hopefully if we’re going to “play that game again” (from last month, an activity drawn from Joseph Cornell’s book, Sharing Nature).
Tandy Hills Natural Area is over 200 acres of prairie in east Fort Worth. In spring there are beautiful wildflower meadows at the top of a ridge, and then the prairie drops down toward the Trinity River (on the other side of Interstate 30) to the north. The whole area has stands of oaks and other trees, with many of the ravines having thick stands of juniper.
I paid Tandy Hills an overdue visit today. It had been a while, and I missed this lovely place. When I wrote Mindfulness in Texas Nature I wanted to wrap up the purpose and the message of the book in an epilogue, and a late winter visit to Tandy Hills was just right. Its significance was that it is a survivor in spite of everything, and it offers small and humble but beautiful gifts like the annual appearance of trout lilies. Its resilience and the broad support it receives gave me reason to hope for a renewal of connection between humans and nature.
I talked about it as an island of nature that was under constant pressure by the surrounding city. The city has done many things right, from buying the property to the support of the parks department. What I meant was that it absorbs the impact of a lot of human visitation, including prohibited motorized vehicles (for example, I saw motorcycle tracks in a muddy spot today) and certain commercial photographers who cynically treat it as a backdrop while trampling the area. Its boundaries do not shut out the nearby highway noise, and invasive plants – especially privet – are constantly trying to make inroads, choking out the native species.
Tandy Hills Natural Area is looked after by a devoted group, the Friends of Tandy Hills, who work with the city to battle invasive plants, manage and improve trails, catalogue the over 2,000 species of plants, animals, and other organisms, and offer programs to the public.
The prairies are beautiful, and they remind me of the places I explored at the western edges of Fort Worth as a kid. Thin, dark soil over white limestone, and a treasure trove of grasses and other plants: little bluestem, Indiangrass, eryngo, basket flower, gayfeather, and many others. And even at this time of year, in their dormant state, they amaze me. There are the subtle colors as well as the beautiful shapes of flowers and seeds.
This was one of those days when the weather is unusually warm, and I go for walks in a t-shirt and enjoy the bright blazing sun when it is low in the sky and makes everything just a little bit warmer in color without the walk itself being overly hot. A few grasshoppers hopped and flew away and several dragonflies hovered and darted around. The prairie changes in each season, and much of it may become dormant in winter, but it is never quiet for long.
Thank you to the prairies, oaks, and junipers. And thank you to the people who keep this place as natural and undamaged as it can be.
After the warm days of October and November, now we are seeing a bit of cold with a first freeze (barely, in some places) yesterday morning. And it is December now; in the “meteorological” way of tracking seasons, winter starts on December 1st. Most of us use the winter solstice, December 21st this year, as the boundary between autumn and winter, but North Texas is at least hearing a few rumors of the winter to come. And that calls for a walk somewhere, putting our ear to the ground to listen.
I walked at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve, eastward along the “yellow” trail near the big pond and then turned and walked up through a tangle of woods to the “blue loop” and back toward the boulders. It was 63 degrees, a jacket needed only when the breeze blew. The place was full of sun and damp sand, native grasses going dormant and a coolness that balanced the sun perfectly.
In my journal I wrote “Phenology Note” on a sketched calendar page, and made a few notes about the trees and leaves. “The trees are still mostly leafed out and green. Many oak leaves are tinged with caramel …. Some trees look ragged but we’re still waiting for autumn color and/or leaf drop.” Back near the parking lot, many of the cedar elm trees are becoming bare, but the oaks seemed barely touched by autumn.
Phenology is the study of seasonal events in nature, and so looking back through a nature journal can show how the seasons change from year to year in a place. What’s the average time when trees lose their leaves, and how much is climate change pushing such events to new places on the calendar?
Using a journal in that way puts me in the mode of science and data, my thoughts separated from emotions about climate change as if severed by a scalpel. But journaling can – and I think should – be more than intellectualizing. On a good day I’ll make room in those pages for what I miss from a time when life was anchored by things you could count on. Winters could be hard or they could be mild; summers might vary in how hot or dry they got; but after whatever variation in the weather, we always returned to an arithmetic mean, an average that we all recognized as something we could count on. But now the math isn’t our friend, and the arithmetic mean is shifting upward and we don’t know what we can count on.
I kept walking, looking and listening for wildlife. A one-minute sample using the Merlin app detected no sounds of birds. I did find a delightful grasshopper resting on a leaf turned nicely red. Uploading a photo to the nature app iNaturalist, the insect was identified as a “mischievous bird grasshopper.”
Now this was a find – what kind of mischief does this sort of grasshopper get into? This particular one was sitting motionless, perhaps too cool for tomfoolery and just feeling lucky to have survived yesterday’s freeze. Adult grasshoppers often don’t survive winter except as eggs deposited in some protected spot, although with increasingly mild winters, more adults like this one might get lucky.
I wanted to follow up on the walk with Logan a few days ago in which we saw southern jack o’ lantern mushrooms. In that particular spot we visited, mushrooms were still there. It might be some particular combination of the right soil, shade, and moisture, but that place stood out with all those mushrooms. There was even a new one of a different sort. According to iNaturalist, it was a type of puffball mushroom. I want to go back to see if it matures to rupture and release a tiny cloud of spores.
Even without a lot of fall color, there were places where the bright, slanting December sunlight backlit a group of leaves and created a dramatic display of color. Going slow, we can notice so many small and wonderful things.
And that includes the mosses. After the way Logan brightened with every new patch of moss he found, I was attuned to them today and really appreciated how they grow on the sandstone up at the bluff. Looking at some boulders was like seeing a miniature topography of meadows and hills.
I also noticed, on the way down the hillside, that the bee tree is active again (there were no bees visible on that cool and cloudy November 29th). I stood for a moment, imagining the extent of the hollow space within that tree, and all the honeycomb built within the spaces, and all that honey!
Yesterday we found several golden orange jack o’ lanterns in the woods, though it’s been a month since Halloween. There were no carved faces, just smooth clumps of orange. My young friend was delighted to find all these mushrooms, just as he was with all the mosses growing in the woodlands. And I was, in turn, delighted to watch his excited discovery of these small wonders.
The “southern jack o’ lantern” is a large mushroom that grows from wood, often in clusters at a fallen tree limb or at the base of a tree. They’re common from summer through autumn at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve, which is where we were. It has been very dry from late summer through much of autumn, but now that rains have come, orange mushrooms are popping up.
A Missouri Department of Conservation website says that the southern jack o’ lantern is bioluminescent, so that “the gills of fresh specimens may sometimes give off a faint greenish glow at night or in a darkened room.” It would be fun to return at night and see if we could observe that.
We are used to seeing a plant or animal that we can point to, whose body or structure is gathered together in one place as one “thing.” However, with fungi it’s more complicated. For much of the year, the jack o’ lantern is a network of tiny filaments and threads running through soil and decaying wood – the mycelium. If I said, “show me a jack o’ lantern,” you would have to dig in the soil or turn over a rotting log to find those little fungal threads and say, “well, there’s part of one.” The mushroom itself is just the reproductive structure, producing spores that are almost (not quite) like seeds that will grow tissues that will become a new fungus. So a mushroom is a little like a flower – the part that catches our attention but is only the reproductive part of a larger organism.
Logan wanted to know if it was edible, so I looked it up using iNaturalist and found that it is poisonous. Not like a death cap mushroom that might be fatal, but the jack o’ lantern would give you the sort of upset stomach that one website said might “make you wish you were dead.” Definitely a mushroom to admire just where it is.
The other thing that really captured Logan’s imagination were the mosses. These little soft, green mounds growing along the ground in protected places can bring many of us into miniature worlds, sitting beside a butterfly and drinking from an acorn cup. They are plants, but without true roots and without the little tubes (vascular tissue) that flowers and trees use to move fluid and sap around. And so they must grow in short, compact mats or mounds. In shady places, an oak tree may grow a garden of moss along one of its bigger branches or at the base of the trunk. At the preserve, the sandstone at the bluff can also provide good growing conditions. The porous rock can hold moisture and is easy for moss to anchor itself to.
Mosses can survive periods of drought to an amazing degree, seeming to spring back to life after a rain. At the top of the preserve there are many partially-shaded places where mosses grow. In the heat of summer, especially when it is quite dry, they become dark green crusts along the rocks, waiting for rain. Then, the plant’s cells fill with fluid and they become green and springy.
Another small growing thing that can produce a sort of miniature garden is lichen. Dead oak branches provide a great substrate for lichen to grow, either as the greenish- or bluish-gray foliose lichens that cover the surface in a ruffled coating, or else as little shrub-like fruticose lichens. One of the latter, the golden-eye lichen, is a favorite of mine.
Lichens are not plants. They are partnerships between two things. Not just a fungus, and not just an alga, but the two things fused together (or sometimes a fungus and a cyanobacterium). The fungus provides a structure and anchors the partners to a rock, a branch of wood, or other suitable place. The algae provide a means to manufacture food via photosynthesis. Together, they can survive sun, drought, freezing, and keep on going.
Regardless of the biological details, these living things add wonder to a walk in the woods. To pause and get on the same level as a moss or mushroom shifts our focus from the everyday world down to a small scale and we see everything in new ways. The details of leaves and the texture of moss, or drops of dew like tiny crystal orbs on the strands of a spider’s web, these things can transport our imagination to new places. It was wonderful to watch Logan find each new patch of moss and each new mushroom with that sense of delight. It was a little like what I see when I take my granddaughter to such places; the emotion and fascination isn’t tied to a particular age (you might see it in me if we took a walk together).
Experiencing nature in this way with children is just the best. It can be a window back into our own childhood, or the childhood we would wish for our younger selves or for others. It is also a hopeful sign for our future, that children can still find magic and connection in nature. And if they carry that forward, we might protect wild places and heal some of the Earth’s hurts.
From our house to your house, we hope this is the kind of day when it’s easy to reflect on blessings, when good food and good people inspire gratitude. May it be a day when challenges and troubles quietly recede to the background for a while.
And beyond today, of course. A regular practice of gratitude, acknowledging even the little stuff, is good for us. I hope that we all have plenty of reason for gratitude every day.
Among my reasons to be thankful are those of you who read what I write here (or at Green Source Texas, or my books). After retiring from my work as a Psychological Associate nearly six years ago, I have been able to do more with my writing than I would have guessed. I’m very glad for anyone who has read an article or book of mine and got something worthwhile from it.
So today, don’t let those turkeys, sweet potatoes, or pumpkins have died in vain – enjoy it all and remember all the little things that we can be thankful for.
I went for a walk at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve with gratitude for the warm day and yet wanting very much to find autumn. That’s a season I look forward to each year, and in this changing climate it is apt to hide behind 80 degree days and dusty drought.
Starting at 3:00pm under sunny skies, I walked up to the top of the hill and sat down to watch, listen, and write a little. it was 82.7F in the shade, with the crowns of post oak trees still covered in green leaves and swaying in the breeze. A little sumac shrub in front of me was brightly backlit by the sun in vibrant green with a little red. Other sumacs had mostly just dropped their leaves, skipping the part where they might live up to names like “flameleaf.”
After a while I walked over to the boulder trail and watched a couple of gulls wheeling and hovering above me. There was some wispy high clouds like a feathery splash of cream in the pale blue sky, while on the ground the shadows were lengthening as 4 o’clock approached.
There was some red in nearby sumacs and a few red leaves of some other plant species. The scarcity of colorful leaves made them that much more welcome. Part of my wish for autumn is the hope of seeing yellows, reds, and oranges as the retreating chlorophyll exposes whatever other colors were masked behind the green. Those colors are part of what confirms that autumn is here, and so I’m grateful for each turning leaf. The rest of the woodland, in somewhat desiccated shades of green, seemed stripped of their place within the season, a shadow of summer.
The clouds drifted, and a few had a hook or curve before stretching out southward or westward, caught and pulled by the currents flowing across the sky. This would be a great afternoon for lying back and watching how clouds are pulled along or drift with the upper winds. Yesterday they seemed in a hurry, but now their movement played out in slow motion.
Merlin reported a blue jay and a hermit thrush, though I did not hear them. Overall it seemed quiet; the traffic seemed to be some distance off and the preserve itself was nearly silent. At 4:12pm it felt like sunset was approaching, and the breeze had come up a little.
In a few days, things will change. There are reports that it will rain, maybe quite a lot. After that, the high temperatures are supposed to remain in the 60s for a while, like we might expect in late November. I will keep walking regardless, because these places like Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve, Tandy Hills Natural Area, the Fort Worth Nature Center and Refuge, are gifts that must not be neglected in any season.
I walked back to the trailhead and was gone at 4:30pm. But I won’t be gone for long.
How are we doing? That’s a complicated, uncomfortable question. To a significant degree, we seem to be worried, dissatisfied, depressed, and isolated. A 2023 Surgeon General’s report notes that people feel “isolated, invisible, and insignificant.” People often remark that they “don’t have the bandwidth” to do something, meaning they don’t have the mental or emotional resources to think about something or take on a task. Such people are ordinarily capable and even resilient, but these days it’s all too much.
A Yale Medicine website talks about depression and suicidal thoughts among young people constituting a crisis, linking to a Centers for Disease Control report that has been removed by the Trump administration (the removal of trustworthy information being, in itself, emblematic of some of our troubles).
A Gallup poll early this year showed a continuing decline in the proportion of people in the U.S. who are very satisfied with how their personal lives are going. A recent American Psychiatric Association poll showed Americans anxious about current events, family safety, economics, their health, and other issues.
Why all this unhappiness? I cannot remember a time when we faced so many challenges. Even during the 1960s when the world seemed on the brink of nuclear war, I don’t remember things feeling like this. Maybe it’s because so many things seem to be falling apart in society and government, all at once. Maybe because grinding poverty and gold-inlaid greed have surpassed the Gilded Age in which people became obscenely wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Perhaps because we are continuing to wreck the climate while societies and governments struggle to even admit that it’s real.
“Polycrisis.” When you do a search for it, you find page after page of articles. There’s even a website devoted to understanding it. An article from a couple of years ago on the World Economic Forum describes it as multiple crises happening at once (like climate change, the Covid pandemic, loss of social cohesion, war in Ukraine and Russian expansionism, oligarchy, resurgent fascism) which can interact with each other producing an effect different from the sum of the separate crises.
What can we do? Each of us, individually, can make choices that will help, though the tasks seem overwhelming – beyond our “bandwidth.” What comes to my mind is a quote from Tolkien, an exchange between Gandalf and Frodo that (in the books, not the movies) occurs when Frodo is discovering that the fate of his world may hang on what he does with a supremely dangerous tool of the enemy:
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, chapter 2
This is our time – the time that is given us. What can we do that might nudge us toward a better life and a better culture? Individually and as a society, what do we value and how do we show it in our lives? What ways of living do we choose, and does it align with our beliefs? I think we need to do more than vote people out (even that option seems to be in jeopardy) and get back to what we were doing. Instead, we need to think very purposefully about the kind of society we want to (re)build and the kinds of kids we want to raise. Can we relate to each other as thinking and feeling individuals worthy of the same dignity and compassion that we expect for ourselves? Does that extend to people of different genders, races, and other ways of sorting each other into “us” as opposed to “them”?
Can we relate to the Earth as more than a big-box store and a theme park? We insist on measuring economic health in terms of growth, so that we must pretend that we can never slow down in our extraction of material from the Earth in order to produce more “product” to sell. We pretend that growth can be unlimited, that if the trend line on the graph becomes flat, the economy is stagnant and the ponzi scheme might unravel. But we could dream of a sustainable way of making our living from each other and from the Earth. We could use the same creativity and intellect that we have expended on nuclear physics or computing technology. If we applied that effort to creating such an economy, surely something good would emerge.
But we could dream of such things only if we want to live more equitably, more in harmony with each other and with the planet. As long as we consider such things to be naive fantasies, nothing much will happen. If we are raised to believe that ruthless competition is the only way to survive, that other people are objects that can be useful or not, we will stay on our current path. If we have been taught that the land, water, air, and every living thing was divinely intended to be used and despoiled by us, we keep in motion a scheme that ultimately will run out, regardless of how we might use our technology to keep it going a while longer.
That seems to be the society we have created. Clear-eyed, remorseless competition and wealth creation because we cannot imagine an alternative in today’s world. More technology, machinery, and artificial intelligence as the only salvation from the messes we create. More of what Joanna Macy called the industrial growth society.
Joanna Macy was a teacher of Buddhism and Deep Ecology whose later writings describe what she called The Great Turning, in which we begin to turn away from the industrial growth society and build a culture that can sustain healthy societies and ecosystems. Her writing, and that of writers like Rebecca Solnit, offer a useful perspective on hope for us – what Macy called, in her book of the same name, Active Hope. It is not an optimism that says “it’s gonna be OK” and allows us to wait in passive expectation for things to get better. It is not something we have, but instead something we do. It is acknowledging the actions that are still possible and working to bring about change, even if it’s little by little. I strongly recommend her writings and her work that she called “The Work That Reconnects”.
This morning I walked at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve for about 45 minutes, underneath a blue sky with the almost-full moon still floating up there, reminding us that we’re just objects in space. And so I remember; we’re on a big, round, blue planet, ever so gradually circling Brother Sun. And we can watch Sister Moon and almost detect her falling and rising as she circles us, mirroring some of the sunlight back to us in the middle of the night so that we won’t forget the day. Or in this case continuing to reflect the sun, framed in morning sunlight, because sometimes it’s better to shine than to go dark.
To shine seems easy and natural for Sister Moon, at least the way we understand it in terms of science. Does she sometimes struggle to do so, like we do? Maybe get up in the morning and say to herself, “I just can’t do this today.” If she is a barren sphere of rock and dust, then I suppose not. But we don’t have to reduce everything to such understanding. Native American wisdom recognizes the moon as a source of wisdom and guidance, and in the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address she is the oldest grandmother, governing tides, watching over the arrival of children, and serving as a leader of women. In the Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon of Saint Francis, the Earth and the heavens – all of nature – are precious gifts reflecting a wonderful Creator. And so in multiple wisdom traditions, the moon is more than what we can measure with instruments.
And she shines throughout the year. Even when our planet is so dark, when human hatred and fear threaten to extinguish every light, Sister Moon gives us light in the darkness. When masked, armed men kidnap the innocent and march zip-tied children into the cold, and when soldiers carry out genocide, she does what I often cannot do: continue to provide light, not be overwhelmed by the darkness.
I would like to be as constant as Sister Moon, but we are not made for such constancy. Being human means simultaneously holding on to the light, doing our best to shine, while also accepting how complicated and imperfect we are. There are times when climate catastrophe, cruelty, runaway greed – the various crises we are facing – temporarily rob us of light. Some days our faces do not reflect the light, even if we want to shine. The important thing is not to accept defeat, to let the light die. We still can imagine something better, we still recognize truth, and we still have within us compassion and empathy, even if some people have discarded it. Such things are our light, and we must let it illuminate us and all those around us.
Our Lives in Nature 