March Nature Report

My rather cliché insight after this third month of photo-documenting walks to Lake St. Clair: When you follow the same route every day, it can be a challenge to see things differently. But if you just take a few steps off the well-worn path, look up close at the things that are always present, or just pause, you feel a shift happen. Or at least I do. In this case, I feel new interest, curiosity, presence, calm, appreciation for beauty, wonder, expansiveness, connected to a larger natural cycle, and sometimes awe. And when I look back at the images I captured, I feel delight - delight in fuzzy and curly things, alive things, edges, reflections, moods, change over time, color and texture and shapes. I feel delight in nature and delight in myself (yes, really) for the choices I made in taking pieces with me. I also feel inspired to improve my skills - to better honor the world(s) I’m representing and better evoke some sense of aliveness in others. The take home message (or at least one of them): instead of feeling rote or inconsequential, routines can actually be much more nourishing, enlivening, and generative than we have come to expect. We just have to take that step.