Nature Stories
Part 1: Using words to craft narratives of our experience.
Hello friends,
I am so excited for this month because it’s the culmination of the past three months: getting lost in wonder and building curiosity chains. It’s all been leading up to STORY.
You see for me, storytelling is at the heart of nature journaling. Do you think that’s odd? Maybe it’s because I love stories so much, but I think each journal entry is a story, which begins with an observation. It has a middle filled with questions, more observations, maybe some answers, and certainly more questions. There is an epiphany – or at the very least a realization. And in the end, you are in a different place mentally than where you began (only to begin again).
In essence, we’ve taken a hero’s journey – gone on an adventure, learned something, won newfound knowledge, and then returned home transformed.
So what is it about narratives that grab us? Well, for one thing, it is the most natural way we communicate. When we talk about our day, our lunch, absolutely anything we put things in a sequence to make logical sense of it. We are compelled to make order out of chaos and then share that perspective.
A story is also an efficient way to remember things. Neuroscience studies show that our brains are wired to better remember stories more than data, facts, and figures.1 It’s why we have folklore and folksongs and oral traditions – all vehicles to transfer knowledge among communities and between generations.
Story is at the heart of Cricklewood’s mission, too, because we create narratives about our experiences with nature. We are recording our observations, but also putting ourselves on the page when we write about how we feel and what something reminds us of. Our observations, questions, suppositions, and guesses move the story forward to a conclusion and catapult us into the next story with more questions.
This month, we will focus on the different tools we have to tell our nature stories beginning this week with Words. (We will experiment with visual and numerical storytelling in subsequent weeks.)
Words
What’s important to remember about nature journaling is that the focus is on discovery. It’s about thinking and learning, not poetry and art (although that can be part of it). The objective is to record key ideas and experiences to build on later.
I like to divide writing into two modes: reflection and communication. Writing to reflect, or to think, is experimental. It is often very much a stream of consciousness because you are capturing your experience in real time. Writing to communicate comes after reflection. It’s when we turn our private musings into an organized piece meant to convey our ideas to others.
Nature journaling is reflective writing. Pure and simple, it’s writing to think.
Writing to think
Maybe like me, you’ve kept a journal of your private thoughts long before you wanted to nature journal. Writing to gather and organize my thoughts has been a part of my life since, well, forever. As a student, all my research papers and essays began as a collection of my thoughts moved around on paper until a central theme or idea began to coalesce. Later I used the same process in my job drafting detailed narratives and white papers for the nonprofit organizations employing me. I use this process to this day when I write for Cricklewood.
Writing for your nature journal is not much different in my experience. It is the perfect place to get your ideas down on paper and move them around. It’s where you can play with trains of thought as you process the sensory input swirling around your brain.
The goals of writing to think are at the core of a nature journaling practice:
gathering information;
recording personal thoughts and observations;
sparking questions;
tracking data.
Each encounter with nature is a story passed down to us through eons of natural history. When we record our observations, we participate in the transference of vital information needed for our survival directly from source material, because as I see it nature is the ultimate storyteller, passing her knowledge to the community and down through the generations.
Nature is the ultimate storyteller.
The Prompt
For today’s prompt, we are going to focus on a single subject in nature and practice different writing approaches using words.
Choose your subject – a leaf, a tree, a squirrel, or a pet (if you can’t go outside).
Make a simple drawing. If drawing is not your thing (for now…), do not stress over this. Keep it very simple and use geometric shapes, stick figures, or symbols. Or capture an overall shape and one or two identifying details.
Use a variety of writing formats:
labels for clarity and context;
bulleted lists for observations and questions;
short phrases for descriptive content;
longer paragraphs to express deeper, more thorough thinking.
Add writing to show your thought process. Lean into the INIWIRMO framework to generate questions, suppositions, descriptions, deductions, and the like. Arrows, boxes, and bubbles will help to connect written thinking, observation writing, and sketches.
That’s all there is to it. Simple, non?
Now, I have a little surprise for you. A couple of weeks ago I attended a virtual conference for nature journal educators, and they gave me a little zine to share with you. I think it fits with our theme this month, so keep it in your journals to use as a reference.
Next week, we’ll delve more into picture-making. Until then…
xoSusannah
This is my 6-month Substack-iversary and to celebrate, during the month of July, I’m offering 30% off of all subscriptions for 12 months.
Why upgrade? In addition to the monthly post and weekly prompts you’ve come to love, you’ll also receive the Tiny Owl Dispatch twice a month. It’s more personal content about nature journaling in Acadia National Park and the surrounding area, my natural history illustration projects, and telling nature stories through words, pictures, and numbers. Plus you also get my “podcast” Cricklewood Campfire containing stories, folklore, and folksongs with a nature theme (of course!), and full access to the archive.
If you decide this is the right time for you to upgrade, I’m so grateful. Cricklewood keeps going with the support of its community. If this isn’t the best time, no worries – know that I treasure you and am so happy that you’re nature journaling with me!
Stephens, G. J., Silbert, L. J., & Hasson, U. (2010). Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(32), 14425-14430. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1008662107