I have experimented with writing letters to you, because I want to communicate about nature and I love the idea of doing so in a personal way. I started with Letters to Nature Kids, which are short and informal “letters” about being out somewhere, or about how nature experience is related to gratitude or coping with fear, and so on.
This latest one has to do with all the small wonders we can notice when out for a winter’s walk. Finding a half-hidden lizard or noticing a tiny shell and tracking its identity down (it was a Texas liptooth) make a walk fascinating, even when the discoveries aren’t very dramatic. Being able to notice and appreciate small things is a valuable skill, and the letter is an attempt to show that this is true.
I notice that these letters get downloaded fairly regularly, but I rarely hear from anyone about them. That makes the whole thing very experimental – writing for the reader who I imagine might read it but not really knowing how a reader felt about it. If you wanted to bring the whole idea of a letter closer to reality, you could write back to me. One way would be to use the contact page here, or there is an email address at the end of the letter. Then we would be having something closer to a conversation, and I would be very grateful for that.
But if not, it’s OK. My hope is that the letter gets read, and that it gets the reader thinking about things and wanting to get outside for a walk.
We had black-eyed peas and cornbread at my house today, like many people do on New Year’s Day. It’s supposed to bring luck, and we can use all the luck we can get in the coming year, so I’ll throw a bit of salt over my shoulder if it will help.
And after lunch I took a walk in a lucky place, a familiar place that I thought should be visited at the start of the year. Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve is clearly a lucky place. It escaped the bulldozer and remains a little fragment of the original oak woodlands and little prairie openings while everything around it has been scraped, paved, and built to become streets and houses. It’s a survivor. And it’s a talisman for all the people who have spent time there and become rejuvenated, charmed, educated about the living world, calmed, or inspired during their visit. So, to start the year off right, I made a loop to the north pond, up to the bluff, and back down the south side of the hill.
It felt somewhat warm but looked like winter. It was 72 degrees in the area, but long, gray clouds with filmy edges stretched across the sky, and the sun shone in a diffused way through part of them, like a light behind a thin cloth. This sky would have been a match for a winter day with temperatures in the 30s.
The shrinking north pond
The north pond has become smaller and more shrunken as the weeks have gone by with no rain. I skirted the water and climbed the hill behind it, and then sat for a little.
Sitting looking south toward the pond
After that, I walked eastward along the north prairie. On that walk at the edge of the woodland, honeysuckle was beginning to bloom. And really, how can you blame the honeysuckle for such a crazy thing, when we’ve been breaking records for warmth. So the preserve can be forgiven for sending out mixed signals like this. I also noticed a very small bird nest from last year, now plainly exposed in a low branch after the leaves have dropped. I hope it brought the birds good luck.
I climbed up to the bluff, where there is a spot nearby that is great for sitting, writing, or just being there. As I sat, pulses of breeze came through, a whoosh of air or hiss in the branches and a papery rattle as the breeze scattered a few leaves on the ground. And a butterfly blew in, a painted lady (or maybe American lady) that landed about eight feet away and rested briefly before taking flight on the wind.
Comanche harvester ants
More insects were busy today, like the bees coming into and out of the bee tree. Maybe they found the blooms of honeysuckle, or maybe they were bringing water from the pond back to the hive. The colony of Comanche harvester ants was clearing another opening at trailside and maybe searching for a few more seeds.
Path curving around the hillside
My walk lasted just over an hour, but it was enough. Now 2026 is off on the right footing, with a little time in nature along with that southern tradition of black-eyed peas and cornbread. May we all have a good, healthy, peaceful year in the coming months. It’s not too late for a walk at the preserve, and you can come by for some peas.
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?
Some caramel color or a tinge of red in leaves that are mostly still green
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.”
The 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.
southern jack o’ lanternunidentified mushroom, probably genus Calvatia
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.
Beautiful blackjack leaves
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.
Southern Jack o’ Lanterns
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.
A big cluster of jack o’ lanterns that Logan found and photographed
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 takes a closer look at a jack o’ lantern
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.
Several forms of lichen growing on a twig
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.
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.”
A few red leaves on some sumac along the hillside
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.
A patch of sunlight backlit this sumac so that it glowed like fire
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.
The top of a heart-sepal wild buckwheatA sumac in darker red
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.
I visited Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve today, much as I have for the past ten years. I followed the trail to the sandstone ridge at the top of “Kennedale Mountain,” walked around the hill and down the boulder trail and back to the west. Despite one recent rain, it is dry at the preserve and many of the plants are drooping. On some sumacs, the leaves are giving up and becoming dark and shriveled. Some others are turning colors and autumn has barely begun. I suppose it reflects the stress of recent hot and dry conditions. Soon, the rest of the sumacs will turn bright red and orange, if they can hold out until the days get a little shorter and the temperature cooler.
Sumac leaves turning red
As I walked, a medium-sized moth flew across the trail in front of me and landed on an oak’s trunk. I was able to get a photo of this slightly fuzzy delta of moth beauty, and then it flew away. Those wings near the head were frosted gray with vague scalloping black lines and then irregular bands of darker color, then a brown band and alternating colors like soft squiggles. Finally there were dark/light dots – one above each scallop of the wing’s edge, with a pattern like tiny feathers. There were a couple of warm reddish-brown spots at the edge of an arc of dark color, symmetrical on each wing. The subtle patterns and colors were beautiful.
The iNaturalist app identified this as a “Sad Underwing,” with the scientific name Catocala maestosa. The genus (Catocala) means essentially “beautiful below” and the species (maestosa) is a reference to “majestic.” The underwing moths have hindwings of a contrasting and often beautiful color, thus “beautiful below.” Those hindwings are covered by the forewings when the moth is resting, and that explains the “underwing” part of the name.
The Sad Underwing
Many underwings have splashes of orange or pink color in those hind wings, which might startle a predator when the moth suddenly takes flight. But this species, the sad one, has hind wings that are very dark brown to nearly black. Some sources suggest that this is the reason for the “sad” in the name, either that the darkness reflects something sad or perhaps that being deprived of color is a reason for sadness. The moth had no comment about it.
From what I can see, the larva – this moth’s caterpillar – is even more camouflaged than the adult, mottled brown and gray to look like tree bark. Multiple sources say that the caterpillar feeds on three tree species: Water Hickory, Pecan, and Black Walnut. The moth is found from eastern Canada down through roughly the eastern half of the U.S., including Texas. NatureServe says that it is found in woodlands and river floodplains.
Walks through this and other parts of the Cross Timbers are often like this. Some small treasure crosses your path somewhere, a moth or bird or flower with a fascinating life story and a beauty that you discover by staying with it for a minute, looking closely, and wondering about it. I have probably walked by underwing moths before and missed all this. I’m very glad I noticed this one today.
As I started on the trail this morning at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve, I asked permission, so to speak. I said: “May I be here as one among many, neither greater nor less than. May I understand how I fit within this place and cause no harm.”
I expected no particular answer, but I did hear calls of Bewick’s Wren, Northern Cardinal, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Blue Jay, and Painted Bunting (identified by the Merlin app), and those calls felt welcoming. Low clouds covered most of the sky, and it was a little like being draped in a warm, wet blanket. Weather Underground said it was 81F and 76% humidity in the area.
On the trail I was submerged beneath the green canopies of oak trees and then emerged at a little open hillside where the spring rains are helping the Little Bluestem grasses look like they might take back the slope that has suffered erosion and drought.
The north pond
At the pond, the roster of bird calls expanded to include White-eyed Vireo, Carolina Wren, and Carolina Chickadee. And while the Black Willows have taken over large sections of the bank, in one spot there was a beautiful patch of flowers. Chickory, Black-eyed Susan, and Bitterweed were scattered in different shades of yellow. And as I looked out over the water, a group of Blanchard’s Cricket Frogs set up a chorus of “grick-grick-grick” calls. Those calls are always surprisingly loud for a little frog that could easily sit on your thumb.
An Eastern Pondhawk. Females of this species are bright green while males are blue
I climbed uphill and away from the pond and walked upslope along the north prairie. Every part of this walk brought wonderful things into view, including Glen Rose Yuccas retaining some of their flowers, a few Indian Paintbrush among the grasses and Western Ragweed, Silverleaf Nightshade (a nettle with a beautiful name and lovely lavender flowers), and Texas Bull Nettle growing tall with their big leaves and white flowers.
And that brought me to the Old Man (Old Woman, if you like) of the preserve, a huge Post Oak that the Texas Tree Coalition designated as a Historic Texas Tree in 2019. It is called the “Caddo Oak,” in honor of the Caddo People who once lived here. After more than 200 years it continues to stand, with a huge trunk and massive branches stretching out like arms to embrace the sky.
The “Caddo Oak“
This “Old Person” – oak trees have both male and female flowers so I shouldn’t assign them a gender – might give us a sense of a something ancient that presides over the place. There are a few other big oaks on the preserve, but probably none that were growing when Texas was part of Mexico, before independence or the battle at the Alamo. We are fortunate that it is still here, never in all those years cut down or burned.
From there I followed the trail as it turned south, taking me to where I could visit the yucca meadow, a big patch of deep, soft sand that supports Glen Rose Yucca, Lanceleaf Blanketflower, and other low plants. Some of the yuccas still had their flowers, though the cycle in which Yucca Moths pollinate the plant and lay eggs where the larvae will then eat some of the developing seeds (not too many) is probably winding down. That meadow is also home to the Comanche Harvester Ant, a species of what Texans call “big red ants” but this one requires deep sandy habitat with nearby oaks, and this limits where they may be found.
The yucca meadow (I took this photo on May 8th)
Continuing around the preserve, I found a tiny juvenile bush katydid with black-and-white banded antennae on the flower of a Lanceleaf Blanketflower, and then a Six-spotted Flower Longhorn Beetle crawling over a Black-eyed Susan flower. On a walk like this, the insects provide so many fascinating forms and colors.
Six-spotted Flower Longhorn Beetle
I arrived within the woodland at the crown of the hill, and the clouds had broken up so that there was bright sunshine and lower humidity. At 11:20am I lay on my back and watched the low fragments of cloud drifting swiftly to the north. At the ground there was a good breeze. A Tiger Swallowtail fluttered through the area, perhaps visiting the Standing Cypress that are scattered wherever there is a small opening in the oak woods.
And the Standing Cypress is having such an amazing year at the preserve. You first see them in winter, growing as a delicate rosette of thin, fern-like leaves. But in spring the plant sends up a tall stem that can grow up to six feet, with a flower spike at the top that produces clusters of red, tubular flowers.
Standing Cypress
It was over two hours of delight, despite that warm blanket of humidity. After the first hour I was pretty well adapted anyway, or else all the wonderful stuff outweighed any discomfort. We are all lucky to be able to go and be part of this wild piece of Arlington.
Saturday the 10th, a group of us took a walk at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve to find moths at sunset. They are very special moths that pollinate and in turn are fed by the Glen Rose Yuccas that live there. It’s a great example of biological mutualism, and it’s the subject of my most recent “Letter to Nature Folks.”
I hope you’ll visit the page with “letters” to you and download that May issue of Letters to Nature Folks – the one marked as “Yuccas and Yucca Moths.” And if it sounds like a good walk (it was a very good walk), thank John and Grace Darling for leading it and telling us the story of how the yuccas and moths completely depend on each other. And thank the Friends of Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve for offering this and other great activities. (Disclosure: I’m on the board of that Friends group, but I’m not the one to thank for the walk.)
I had to go to the woods today. Among my frequent visits to those places, some are for spiritual and psychological first aid. Today was a day like that.
Cardinals like this male were singing throughout the preserve
Here at Sheri Capehart Nature Preserve, I can sit on the ridge and look down into the brown and gray woods, still in those colors for a while before the leaves appear. There are some glimpses of green, bits of juniper seen through oak branches, and patches of moss at the base of tree trunks. And there is a flash of reddish feathers from a female northern cardinal.
Yes, there is traffic noise and a barking dog somewhere, but it feels quiet and there is a stillness to the dormant woods, here at the edge of spring. I needed this respite. Not a respite from my home, except that home is where the news arrives. Home is where I get sucked into the Internet, with stories from the world: destruction, corruption, and bullying. Here, I don’t allow the news to appear on my phone, which is used only for photos or checking the Merlin app to identify some unseen bird.
The sun is at my back and a butterfly dances by. Mosses and lichens growing on the stones of the ridge provide endless color, life, and art. And there is the stillness that hardly seems able to be found in the city.
Butterflies agree that spring is ready to arrive. On the trail from the ridge to the boulders, a fritillary glides in toward me on rigid orange wings. It sails on past, wings now flapping to carry it up to the treetops. Nearby, a pair of butterflies suddenly appear and spiral up in their fluttering flight, above the crown of the nearest tree. When I reach the boulders, a pair of sulfurs chase each other down the path. The fluttering, erratic flight of butterflies might make us think they cannot control their flight very well, but have you noticed how often they can weave among obstacles without hitting them? That erratic flight seems to be a gift, an ability to make quick turns and maneuvers that help them escape predators.
The historic 200-year-old post oak referred to as the Caddo oak
I walk around the preserve, past the historic Caddo oak, seeing many more butterflies and hearing a number of bird species: Carolina wrens, tufted titmice, a chickadee or two, an eastern phoebe, and many northern cardinals. I see a red-tailed hawk overhead, soaring and then turning on powerful wings.
A slightly fuzzy photo of the red-tailed hawk
Arriving near the north pond, I think about how much data we have about the benefits of mindfulness and time spent in nature. There is the reduction in stress, the cardiovascular benefits, an immunologic boost, reduction in depressive rumination, and increases in empathy among other gifts. Those things make time in the woods not some privileged escape or ignorance of the troubles of the world. It is a sort of refueling for the work that lies ahead. It is restorative – a little like sleep – and so it should not be undervalued.
Blanchard’s cricket frog at the pond’s edgeA young red-eared slider, basking
It is now 77F in the shade. Down at the north pond, life is in full swing. red-eared sliders swimming or pulling out and basking in sunshine. Cricket frogs jumping into the water as I get too close to them. All that is needed is the emergence of dragonflies, and the pond will seem complete. I walk back to the car after nearly two hours of walking, sitting, and noticing things in a world that seems so different from the big events of the wider world. It has been a small but important restoration.
Our Lives In Nature 