Hi everyone – recently I mentioned some changes going on, and I want to invite you once again to visit and subscribe to “Rain Lilies” at Substack. In about a month, Our Lives in Nature will phase out and I’ll be focusing on Rain Lilies. I will also be working on the project and website, “Cross Timbers Connection,” and a good bit of the downloadable stuff stored here will reappear in some form over there. For example, I’ve already updated and transferred the pdf guide for identifying venomous snakes to that site.
I’d love to see you in either or both places. When I write something that is a good fit for Cross Timbers Connection, it will appear over there, and Rob and others will be contributing as well. I continue to write for Green Source Texas (for example, my articles about “nature kids” there). And I’m on the board of Friends of Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve and I offer talks and blog articles there as well.
I recently spent part of a morning at one of the ponds at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve and wrote about the green herons that were hunting there. That is at Rain Lilies, and there will be more short pieces from the woods and fields. And more meditations about the human condition and our relationship with nature.
Green heron
I value all of you who are here and hope to keep in touch (and I invite you to make it a two-way street by commenting or making suggestions!). See you at Rain Lilies!
Hi everyone. You may have seen that I have a Substack titled Rain Lilies. It has been a kind of parallel creation to Our Lives in Nature for some time, and I am going to move everything there – and I really hope you’ll follow me over to Rain Lilies.
Much of it is similar to blogging here. If you subscribe at Substack, you get new posts emailed to you, with photos. There are more options for feedback and community, including “liking” posts, posting notes and participating in site-related chats. I’m interested in taking advantage of some of their podcasting options, too. One difference is that there is not an option for downloadable PDF documents such as my letters or some of the herpetology resources (but see below).
There is an option to be a paid subscriber, but I want to share what I write without money getting in the way, so it will be much like here: contribute if you like and can afford to, or subscribe for free if that works better for you.
Here’s what I said at the Rain Lilies site about its contents: Subscribe to see if my thoughts offer any light about nature, community, society, and how we navigate the world. I am a nature writer who had a career in psychology and I am deeply concerned with our well-being and how we live out our values. I’m also deeply grateful for unspoiled places in nature.
I’m very glad for everyone who has subscribed here, and I hope you’ll give Rain Lilies a try if you haven’t.
I’m also happy to tell you that Rob Denkhaus and I have decided to restart “Cross Timbers Connection,” which was a nonprofit nature organization some years ago. This time it will be more informal. We do want to make some resources available for download, so some of the resources here may be available from the forthcoming Cross Timbers Connection website. And other resources will include the Post Oak & Prairie Journal (POPJ).
POPJ was “A record of observations, description, and analysis of plant and animal communities in North Texas. The focus of the Journal is on the Cross Timbers, the Blackland Prairies, the Rolling Plains, and the Post Oak Savanna ecoregions.” There was and will be everything from data-driven natural history reports to essays about the places and how we fit in those places – our roles in understanding, managing, and conserving. Authors of articles are largely Texas naturalists ranging from university faculty and students to naturalists with less formal training. Have a look at the sample issue and see if you might want to write for it!
I would like anyone reading what I write to know this: Artificial Intelligence has no place in this blog or any of my other writings; it’s a matter of integrity. By that I mean the integrity of our relationship, between writer and reader – what I offer you is real, and really comes from me, for better or worse.
In none of my books did AI play a role, in drafts or in final form. And when I write something for Green Source Texas, what I send to the editor is from my notes and my brain with no AI anywhere in the process.
I’m putting this out there because of the extent to which social media and corporations are coming to depend on this stuff, and I think it’s fundamentally dishonest. Perhaps there is a role for AI in some technical endeavors, but not here.
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.
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.
Autumn color a few years ago at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve
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.
All the things I write about here are on the line. Our lives, in nature and in society. All aspects of our lives.
This is a time when speaking up is essential. As individuals, our choices nudge the society a little bit in one direction or another, and sometimes our collective choices make a profound difference. That choice has now arrived. If my voice as a writer and blogger can reach a little past my front door, then there is a moral need for me to speak up. All of us should.
In a little over a month, our collective choice is between someone profoundly unfit to lead anyone and a person with the knowledge, experience, and wisdom to preserve democracy and the rule of law. And there’s more than just a vote for Kamala Harris, there is the need for a Senate and House not owned by the wealthy and populated with opportunists and wild-eyed autocrats.
It was never my intention to write about politics, and this is not so much about politics as it is a plea for sanity. This is the first time a major candidate has been a con man, a habitual liar, a sexual predator, a fascist, and a person credibly described as a malignant narcissist. My psychology background and common sense tell me that to live (in a household or in a nation) under the control of a malignant narcissist is to be in extraordinary danger. It is to be manipulated, used, harmed, and tossed aside. Those victims are all of us, individually and collectively as a nation, not just hypothetical players on the evening news.
Many of his followers are clamoring for civil war, and some of them attempted a coup when Trump lost the last election. Some of his followers are overt Nazis, and others unquestioningly believe any lie and support any suggestion he makes.
If there was a need for this to tie in with our lives in nature, there is his promise to “drill, baby, drill,” his rejection of the science of climate change and his call for “raking and cleaning and doing things” as a way to prevent California fires (the environmental equivalent of his lunatic suggestion of injecting bleach as a treatment for COVID), his history of – and future plan for – rolling back environmental regulations and hollowing out the EPA, his offer of a bribe to oil executives if they would give him a billion dollars, and on and on.
The documentation is out there, easily available, and there is no point in my posting it all here and making this a long essay. My plea is for all of us to do what we can to, frankly, elect Democrats in November, not because I’m such a fan of that party but because in this election, they are the party in support of facts, reason, truth, and some commitment to respect the rights of all of us, however imperfectly.
Part of the authoritarian playbook is to make us all exhausted and unsure of what’s really true or if the facts really matter. If you’re tired of it all, want to push it aside as “just politics,” and you’re ready to skip the election, please don’t. Don’t make this a national suicide. The other side is not just an opposition party, it is an abyss.
On Tuesday I took a walk at Fort Worth Nature Center & Refuge, and wrote about it as a “Letter From the Woods.” I took the trail across the demonstration prairie and up the Oak Motte trail a ways, seeing lots of insects, a couple of spotted whiptail lizards, and an eastern phoebe that appeared to divide its time between dropping down and catching insects and moving ahead of me.
I hope you’ll have a look (it’s the September letter that you can download here). And I’d love to hear any thoughts you might have, including whether you’d rather see it as a blog post. There’s just a little about the importance of insects, and E.O. Wilson’s great phrase, “the little things that run the world.” And there’s the dung beetle, whose name might be Sisyphus.
I have begun writing something that starts with what I experience somewhere in a prairie or the woods, and ends up in front of you, like a letter. I’ll write to tell you what I saw and experienced (and if you write back, that would be great!). I’m drawn to the idea of letters, a throwback to a time when we wrote to each other on paper, to be delivered to our houses and held in our hands as we read them. Now when we send something, we use the Internet and the delivery is more foolproof and quicker. I guess we don’t so much mind reading on screens.
I’ve been doing something similar when I write “Letters to Nature Kids,” nineteen of them so far in the past couple of years. They are written with older elementary school kids and teens in mind, exploring such topics as seeing horned lizards, writing in a nature journal, venomous snakes and safety, thankfulness (on Thanksgiving), and so on. Each one is a free download from the Letters to You page of this website.
And now I’ve written the first of what might be many “Letters From the Woods,” also downloadable as a pdf document at this website. I can design and format it more flexibly than I could a blog post, and you could easily hang onto it or share it if you wanted. I can post a link to each new one here on the blog, and you could click the link or go to the Letters to You page.
It’s kind of an experiment – would you let me know what you think? I’d truly be grateful for any feedback, either as a comment on this post or an email to me (livesinnature@outlook.com). Here is the first one:
I’ve just uploaded a “Letters to Nature Kids” issue. These are free, short pdf documents written for young people and anyone else who is still a little bit in touch with that kid they used to be. Most of them focus on some place or some species worth learning about, and some of them have a bit of a holiday theme. This one touches on Groundhog Day, National Send a Card to a Friend Day (obscure, but we should try it!), and of course Valentine’s Day and the various ways that love graces our relationships with friends, spouses, or even nature. I hope you’ll go have a look at it here.
Some of you download and read the Letters to Nature Kids that I write periodically. They’re available within the “Publications” page. I may not post about each one, so they may be overlooked by some who might want to read them. (Parents or teachers might download them and pass them along to kids, but adults read them at least sometimes.) This time I thought I’d put in a word for the Halloween issue.
The first thing I thought about was, of course, how we hijack things in nature, presenting them in ways that make them fearful. Bats, spiders, owls and such. On the one hand, I don’t want to get on my high horse and spoil the fun. I even tried to join in the fun a little by saying: “Bats live in the opposite of the bright daytime world in which we see and hear birds. When people think of angels, they give them feathered wings, but images of demons often have bat wings.”
On the other hand, after Halloween is over, kids should not be left with fears of these things. So I said, “People make up stories, either for fun or as a way to try to explain what they don’t really understand.”
The issue I feel most strongly about is kids (or anyone, for that matter) who take it too far. Halloween should not be an excuse to badly scare some child. I said, “It can be fun to be scared just a little, when we’re with friends and we know the scary thing isn’t real. … Sadly, some people enjoy scaring others because it makes them feel more powerful or stronger than the person that they scared. I’m not talking about kids having fun with each other, I’m talking about a person who enjoys seeing someone really afraid in a way that’s not fun. That’s bullying and it is not OK. Stay away from someone like that.”
If you know someone who might enjoy this Halloween issue, download it and pass it along. And have a safe, fun Halloween!
Our Lives in Nature 