Welcome to Easy by Nature. Join me on a journey to one of the most beautiful places in the world: your yard. That’s right, your yard can be a stunningly beautiful place. It can serve as an oasis and refuge from the noise, confusion, and cruelty in the world. Nurturing this beauty represents one of the most rewarding things you can do.
When you walk out your back door you pass through a portal into another realm. Your yard can be a safe space where you enter into a relationship with nature through gardening and birdwatching. This type of placemaking can add meaning and purpose to your life.
“For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it.”
Wendell Berry
Many forces work against us connecting with nature. The judgmental eyes of our neighbors, our cultural conditioning, our love of turfgrass, our addiction to convenience, and our ubiquitous distractions.
You can overcome all of these forces by embracing the fact that the way we act determines how we feel. Active participation is more powerful than inquiry. This is especially true if you are supported by a like-minded community of people. Increased awareness and support from others will help you bring the things that you do into harmony with who you are at your core.
Placemaking is a fascinating journey. Once you start down the path, you are on your way to being transformed.
All you need to know to begin is that the journey is the end goal.
Albert Einstein recognized this fact in 1922, and he wrote in his journal,
"A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness."
A garden gives you something to hold onto, something tangible that lies beyond money, affluence, and prestige. True joy awaits us in the garden, a joy that is healing and contagious. A sunrise and a flower are all you need. Open yourself to the experience, and it will pull you in.
“All of us under its spell, we know that it’s probably magic …
Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection, the lovers, the dreamers, and me,”
Kermit the Frog.
Birds Keep us Safe
Over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, we have learned that when birds are singing, we are safe. When the birds stop singing, we are in danger. We used to be threatened by lions, but now myriad threats of our own making are poised to silence us and the birds.
Fortunately, birds are resilient and adaptive, and if we give them a little space, they will respond. Our yards can serve as important habitat for birds and other wildlife. If enough people plant native plants that provide food and cover, we can create vast, interconnected networks of habitat.
This will bring a wide diversity of birds within close proximity to more people. Over time, people and birds can develop a relationship. Terry Tempest Williams embodies this relationship as she recounts in her book Refuge.
“I pray to the birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day – the invocations and benedictions of the earth. I pray to the birds, because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear, and at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.”
In the coldest months of the year, the hardiness and tenacity of our winter resident birds are on full display. Tiny birds like chickadees and the winter wren that seem the most vulnerable to cold can be seen going about their day in frigid weather. Florence A. Merriam captures the tenacity and attitude embodied by a winter wren in this encounter from 1889.
“I found the piquant little Winter Wren bobbing about among the bushes, oblivious to everything except their own particular business. I gave one of them a start as I came on him unexpectedly. So, on catching sight of a second, I kept cautiously quiet, but, if you please, as soon as he got a glimpse of me, the inquisitive brown sprite came hurtling from one raspberry stem to another, with his absurd bit of a square tail over his back, and never once stopped till he got near enough for a good look. There he clung, atilt of a stem, bobbing his plump, little body from side to side, half apologetically, but saying “quip” with an air that assured me, he was afraid of no giant, however, big! When I had admired his mottled, dusky vest, and his rusty brown coat with its fine, dusky barring, and noted a light line over his eye and the white edging of his wing, and when he had decided to his satisfaction what I was doing there in the woods, he went, hopping along, under an arching fern, off to the nearest stump.”
My goal is to help people connect with nature through gardening and birds. We all need to embody the curiosity, tenacity, and attitude of the winter wren. We do not need more time, we do not need more information, we need to tell ourselves a different story.
There is a subtle throughline that connects us all. Sometimes it is diffuse and hard to see, at other times it is vibrant and dazzling. Whether we perceive it or not, this rainbow is always there.
We can create a community that supports people in telling different stories. This is happening across the country through a variety of organizations, including the new Homegrown National Park movement. We are part of nature, we all feel the pull of biophilia: let’s come together and embrace it.
We should tell the story about ourselves that rings true. A story that reinforces our best selves and acknowledges our deep-seated connection to nature. We will be judged either way, so we might as well be judged by a story that represents who we really are.
Podcast
See Rich Roll podcast with Johann Hari for a groundbreaking discussion about addiction that describes connection as the ultimate solution.
Book
See Douglass Tallamy’s book Nature’s Best Hope to learn more about the new Homegrown National Park movement and how you can turn your yard into an oasis.