Tag: nature
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Notes from Camping with 13 Year Old Girls
Age 13 is often a challenging time for a kid. It’s the transition time. Biologically, humans turn adult during this year, give or take a couple. While cell differentiation in certain body system’s are blasting away a million times a second, differentiation from one’s care givers, like a rocket separating from the mother ship in […]
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Fall in Love for Nature this Autumn
Here are some tips to grow a great relationship with your yard and local ecosystem, now that summer has finally flipped off the calendar. While you and I are just proverbial drops, our landscape actions accumulate, and then fill the bucket (our local ecology) with a certain flavour – pollution or purity, resilience or climate […]
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Ten Life Lessons from Ten+ Years Living Off Grid
I lived without utility supplied electricity, water, or sanitation for over a decade. Was it all romance, extensive fanfare, and free living? Not a chance. It was time consuming, high maintenance work requiring constant presence. Living off grid means you are a chief maintenance person, head of parts, repairs and the main author and chief responder […]
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Remember Climbing Trees? People Are Taking to the Trees Again
The act is natural, refreshing and fun. Do you realize that tree climbing can help save your sanity, tone your muscles, quiet your mind, and create strong leadership sorely needed for this generation and those to follow? Climbing itself builds balance, confidence, wherewithal, and courage. It allows us to toy with our playful selves, stretching […]
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Look-a-Likes Welcome Winter
Last night the moon was so bright and the sky was super clear. But, was it cold! There’s something about 3 or 4’C that often seems colder to me than when the mercury dips below zero. This is my ultra-short homage to the greener, warmer days of spring, summer and fall. Enjoy these ‘look-a-likes.’ These […]
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Deep Connection with Wild Animals: Avenues for Right Relationship with Earth
Being one of millions and millions of ‘living*’ planets now discovered, the Earth, in essence, is a wild animal within a greater population. We’re in sad and yet exciting times. We know a lot. We are aware. We are very skilled, loving and crafty beings. All of this and since I was born (1970) we […]
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Big Impacts Across Small Spaces…Doug Tallamy Photosynthesizes the Case for Native Plants
All photographs by Ben Porchuk. Tallamy talks nature in Toronto. Toronto… and nature? Yes, Toronto, the city of over 6 million people. It might not be the first place that comes to mind when you think of re-building the natural world. But Doug Tallamy, an entomologist from the University of Delaware, was invited specifically to […]
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Who, Me, You? A Forest Therapy Guide?
If anyone out there is remotely considering becoming a Forest Therapy Guide and the upcoming New Zealand training is on your radar, then I’d strongly recommend waiting no longer. But, who am I to say? It recently occurred to me that every person I have recommended to go to guide training camp has come to […]
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When you are physically lost (and found) in nature
Have you ever been lost in nature even for some significant time before you were found? It can be more than a bit unnerving, near fatal, and rewarding all at the same time. When this occurs, what might you be lost from? The trail head? The ‘tamed world’? Your home? Often all of these things […]