It’s nearly been a year since I started teaching nature journaling at one of our local book shops in Wentworth Falls, here in the Blue Mountains, and longer that I’ve been making notes on the seasonal changes here. I feel like I’m getting close to being able to map out a wheel of the year for here. It takes a long time. I’ve often noted that to create a local wheel of the year it would take at least three years, and probably as much as ten to twelve to really see the cycles of fire and flood as well as those of yearly change.
As I’ve lived here the last eight years, we’ve seen years with snow and ice, years of devastating bushfires, heavy rains that brought landslides and waterlogged land, droughts where we needed to save every precious drop of water, years where the cicadas came in hoards, or when we finally saw the Christmas beetles come back. We’ve seen the long cycles, and the shorter ones that move through times of germination, new growth, flowering, seeding, and the fall of leaves and bark. We’ve noticed the presence of different animals as the temperature changed, or their mating habits and territorial activities came and went.
In our nature journaling class we’ve looked at various mammals, birds, reptiles, insects and water creatures. We’ve looked at microscopic details, mapped the rivers, explored the geology, marvelled at the details of different plants and their flowers and seeds, and cast our minds out to surrounding areas, as well as the planet as a whole, and the sun, moon and stars. Soon it will be time to bring it all together to see a bigger picture; marking out times when we notice changes each year, noting creatures and plants that seem to hold the symbol of the season; noticing the times when shifts occur and change is in the air; as well as times when we celebrate – and what, and how we do that.
Wheels of the year don’t spring into formation fully whole. They emerge slowly and deepen gradually as our understanding also deepens. Each cycle we understand more, we see more, and we can add more to that map. Layers on layers of meaning. Because there are many cycles we are experiencing, not just yearly cycles, but those of longer periods of time as the ocean currents change the weather patterns, as the bushland burns to regenerate, and as we humans interact with the world around us, adapting to its cycles and acting in accordance with them.
So as this year of teaching comes full circle and begins again, it is not an ending, but an opening to further deepening of the process. We will start to make comparisons with the previous year’s observations, and to ask deeper questions: not just “what do we see?” but “what does it mean to us?”. We will look at symbols and metaphors, seasonal markers and calls, and the ways in which they can be celebrated.
Would you like to try nature journaling? I am teaching it in person at the Good Earth Bookshop in Wentworth Falls:
Tuesdays 5:30pm-8:00pm
Wednesdays 10:30am-1:00pm
You can purchase tickets via the Good Earth Bookshop’s website: www.goodearthbookshop.com/events
Julie Brett 