I’ve added another downloadable “Letter From the Woods,” this one is about a recent walk at LBJ National Grasslands. The link takes you to a PDF of that letter that you can download, print, and share if you like. Or, if you would prefer, I posted it yesterday at Rain Lilies on Substack, and you can see it here. Either way, have a look and see how great it was to visit the grasslands again!
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:
Our Lives In Nature 