[00:00:00] Welcome to Planet Spoonie, the podcast for lymies and spoonies healing themselves and the world. I'm your host, Kelsey, clinical herbalist, holistic nutritionist, student of chronic lyme, and lover of all things outdoors. In this collective space, we explore the core foundations of holistic nutrition, herbal medicine, and nature connection.
[00:00:20] With open minds and hearts, we take an inquisitive look at how all chronic illness is intimately linked to the climate crisis. Today's episode is all about Nature Connection. This is the last episode focusing on these three main foundations of what I teach and practice and what has made the biggest impact on my life living with chronic illness.
[00:00:43] You can expect to learn more about why Nature Connection is so important for both our own personal healing as well as healing in our communities and ecosystems and for the planet itself. I am so glad you're here with me, collaborating on this journey, and without further ado, let's dig in! Do you feel super overwhelmed by the idea of figuring out how to face the climate crisis while also living with chronic illness?
[00:01:11] Do you feel like there is constant doom and gloom in the news and you have no idea what you can actually do to help and make a difference that is practical to your everyday life? Have you realized the amount of toxicity out there while trying to learn about your own chronic illness or diagnosis and now feel super overwhelmed and unsafe by recognizing the amount of toxins in our tap water, our clothing, furniture, our food?
[00:01:39] And so many other things that we're exposed to on a daily basis. Do you just feel lost and disconnected and hopeless about finding solutions to your health as much as you do about the environment? Do you want to feel more connected to nature and to the earth and to start living sustainably? Do you want to feel more connected to your heritage and ancestry and to know how they lived and how they ate?
[00:02:09] Do you want to live more closely to nature? To learn about foraging for food and medicine, about gardening, about maybe even keeping animals at home like ducks or chickens or honeybees? Do you want to learn how to live with the land instead of on it? If you answered yes to any of these questions, stick around for this episode and Frankly, just follow or subscribe to the podcast because this is something we are going to dig into and talk about so much more.
[00:02:39] In fact, we have episodes coming up super soon talking about these exact topics. So these problems are problems that are part of modern society. It's part of modern life. Most of us grew up in neighborhoods and environments and homes where, if we were fortunate, we had access to fresh foods, but we were completely disconnected from where they came from.
[00:03:04] I can't tell you how many times in my life I have offered someone fresh food while, food or medicine actually, while out hiking or foraging from whatever trail we're on. Or from my own garden, and they look at me like I'm crazy. They have no idea what to do with this. This happened the other day with someone in my garden.
[00:03:25] It happened one time years ago with these kids that I was babysitting. And we found this beautiful blackberry bush covered in ripe, juicy blackberries at peak ripeness. And they were too scared to eat it because in their eyes blackberries came out of a plastic tub. that you got at the store. And I've been on hikes with people where it's the same thing.
[00:03:47] And others respond with just pure joy and excitement and they're ready to eat it whatever it is. This was me in herb school. And sometimes you really actually have to be willing to taste things that are pretty icky because you can learn a lot from that. But anyways, this is how far, this is how disconnected we've become.
[00:04:08] And it's these little things that may seem really small, right? Like not knowing what a watermelon plant looks like or what beets look like. And for a lot of people, food apartheid is absolutely still Something that is happening here in the state. So I am not including the folks that don't even have access to fresh foods But for so many people there is access through neighborhood markets, farmers markets, CSAs, perhaps garden space or community gardens There are lots of options out There are it's amazing what you can actually just grow on a balcony or on a patio space.
[00:04:45] My great grandmother's house The few pictures I've seen of their home she had All of these old like folders and other coffee cans and she would grow food and herbs and these old coffee cans on her porch. And I think that's just so beautiful. I actually have an aloe plant that came from one of her aloe plants.
[00:05:04] So it's gone through. I'm the fourth generation to have this plant, but these little things, right? Learning what the native plants are and your local landscape. Learning which ones are invasive and safe for you to forage and learning which ones are perhaps threatened or endangered and really you ought not to forage or harvest from.
[00:05:25] Other things like learning the orientation of the sun. Where is the sun in the spring, the summer, the winter, and the fall? Where is the sun at 8am versus 2pm? These kinds of things I think are really easy to dismiss because Most of us, no one I've grown up with or really have spent time with has grown up learning these things or talking about these things with anyone, maybe bits and pieces, but not the overall picture.
[00:05:52] And it's really important because for so many reasons, one is that if we don't recognize where we've come from and if we don't recognize our past and our history, we are bound to make the same mistakes. History repeats itself. And two, not that we really, in my opinion, need an excess amount of research to prove this.
[00:06:16] It seems pretty common sense, if you think about the principles of evolution and the world we evolved in to get to this point in time here today. I think when we take that perspective, an ecological evolutionary perspective on medicine and health and life, then we recognize that there is nothing in our environment That isn't significant.
[00:06:34] That isn't important, right? Light, air everything matters. Our water, our soil, all of these things are significant to creating a healthy human being. And one of the most difficult things about being alive right now is recognizing that these avenues for health, these avenues for building up healthy ecosystems, which build healthy organisms which in turn contribute to healthy ecosystems, right?
[00:07:05] This, it's, this applies to humans, but this applies to everything, is is threatened. This is threatened because industrial westernized culture has polluted all of these things. We are now living with a global epidemic, a global problem with air pollution. with water pollution, with soil pollution. Now even with light pollution, sound pollution, EMF pollution on every level we have just completely altered the environment that we exist in.
[00:07:41] And it can be easy to dismiss some of these things like light. Y'know how does using light bulbs at night or having screens on at night effect me, right? That's no big deal. Or, how does EMFs effect me? How does not being physically in contact with the Earth on a regular basis affect me. I think it's super easy to not think these things are important, and if I hadn't gone through the experience of feeling this disconnect in my body of feeling what happens when I re establish more natural cycles into my life, and how that impacted my healing I don't know that I would even believe this or get this, because we really We live in a culture that is very logic based, and we take a very kind of skeptical approach with our logic.
[00:08:27] So we want hard proof and evidence for everything, but the proof and evidence we often want can't be empirical. It can't be evidence that, for some reason, is passed down through generations of people who have lived this way for thousands of years. We need it to be fitting within this small little window of, What we now would consider good evidence, right?
[00:08:50] And, frankly, there's tons of evidence, actually. There are so much literature out there now exploring the benefits of being in nature. There are some fantastic books and resources. where you can explore more about this about deep ecology and intersectional environmentalism. There, there is incredible work out there by people like Joanna Macy and Richard Louv.
[00:09:13] One of my favorite books I read while doing research for my undergraduate thesis was Your Brain on Nature. This is a super fun one. They go through the different elements. And just list, study after study about how pictures of nature affect people's healing, how a window looking out into nature affects a person's healing.
[00:09:34] There are so many different components of this. And I know for myself, there are things that I integrated into my life before I knew, even knew any of this research. It was more just based off intuitively what my body was asking for, what I was wanting to experiment with, especially once I started going to herb school.
[00:09:49] And... I felt it for myself what an impact it made when I stopped using lights at night and just allowed myself to move more with the cycles of When the sun went down, I let myself be in the dark and when the sun came up, I got up. And I didn't follow this perfectly, but I followed this pretty strictly, or it feels natural to me, it doesn't feel too difficult to me.
[00:10:14] Though everyone has different scenarios, but incorporating these little things can actually make a huge impact. And I think the research will continue to show this more and more. But one of the things that I so commonly hear folks with chronic illness and chronic Lyme stressing about, especially because chronic Lyme in particular, is usually a state in which the body is experiencing very high toxicity.
[00:10:40] These toxins are created by the organisms that actually cause the disease. And these kind of metabolites, or endotoxins they're called, created by these little bacteria, are actually what cause our symptoms. Lyme's.
[00:10:57] And the tricky part is that now, really, any chronic illness you have, you can look at pollutants in your environment and how they impact you, because we're simply living in a time where most of us don't have access to clean water, most of us are impacted by air pollution most of us have a hard time, even if we're able to find fresh foods, able to find foods that haven't to eat.
[00:11:23] been grown in ways that are directly polluting the earth, that are impacting the nutrient density of the food, that maybe are, the food itself is being like sprayed or treated with toxins or if it's not fresh, if it's some kind of process or pre prepared or packaged food, there are toxic ingredients added into the food because when, when you're trying to ship fresh produce across the country or make a meal last for longer than a few days, People have to do things to prevent it from rotting, from breaking down.
[00:11:56] And when things are being shipped all over the country, this is, this kind of just goes hand in hand with the system. This is part of why there is this huge local food movement. And I talk about food a lot when it comes to Nature Connection because our food choices is, as I talked about a couple episodes ago, it is just one of the core foundations for how we can impact the healing of our own body and the healing of the earth, because these choices matter immensely.
[00:12:22] How the fish was caught, how the produce was grown, these things are immensely important to the health of the local ecosystems, the farmers, growers, harvesters, fishers, whoever. People who are working with that food directly and for yourself and for your families for your communities And this is why it's so amazing to learn how to grow your own food and herbs But that is something we will talk a lot more about on other episodes so Food is one big avenue, but all of these pollutants, this is just something that I hear pretty frequently makes people feel really overwhelmed.
[00:13:00] And I know I experienced this for myself when I first dove into this world of nutrition and natural medicine ancestral living. And was just exploring everything is you realize that there's a prop 65 warning about carcinogen exposure, or you get a warning about endocrine disruptors or about lead exposure when buying just about anything when going into the coffee shop.
[00:13:24] So you're left wondering what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to cope with this level of toxicity in the environment? And my body is already ill. So how can I possibly. So I'm going to work with all of this stuff that's out there. How can we make change? And there are many ways that we can make change.
[00:13:46] It is possible. I know it feels really overwhelming, but I promise you by just taking these approaches of working with herbal medicine, traditional cooking, and nature connection, You will find that there are actually so many ways to help your body cope with this. This is one of the reasons I think people talk so much about detoxification now.
[00:14:06] There is definitely a lot of unhealthy narratives out there about cleansing and detoxification, but for this purpose, I am talking, pretty literally about helping our body cope with the level of pollution in our environment. And this is actually something that you can learn more about. The National Institute of Health has a really helpful Kind of graph and like web page.
[00:14:28] There's many that go more into this But there's one particular page and little graphic that shows the impact of the climate crisis on human health and how there are all these different elements of pollution that are increasing the rates of different conditions and we know through again a huge bank of research and evidence that usually this pollution is disproportionately affecting communities of color We see this with air pollution, with water pollution with soil pollution, with food access and it's why intersectional environmentalism is so important because all of these things are interwoven and nothing is disconnected.
[00:15:08] I know that it can feel really overwhelming and we can have these periods of feeling like total doom and gloom, total hopeless, what can I do about this? These issues that we're facing, these monumental global issues that are affecting us on such a wide scale and also on a really intimate, personal level.
[00:15:27] Because as we know, all chronic illness is linked to the climate crisis. And the answer I want to talk about today... It's nature connection. Nature connection can be so simple. It does not have to be this like really overcomplicated thing. It can be as simple as moon gazing every night for four minutes.
[00:15:46] It can be establishing a sit spot somewhere outside every day. It can be getting fresh sunshine on your skin first thing in the morning when you wake up. It can be learning about stargazing. Downloading a stargazing app to your phone and taking the time to stargaze, or downloading a birdsong identification app to your phone and learning to identify different birdsongs.
[00:16:09] And It can really be that simple, and you will be amazed, and maybe you've probably experienced this already, but if not, you will be amazed at how these practices can affect how you are feeling physically, mentally, and emotionally. I remember there was this time that I was working on the farm. I think it was probably my first year working on the farm, so I may have been volunteering still at that point or just working as a farm hand.
[00:16:38] And I was walking on the dirt road that we had between the fields. Actually I was between the the creek and the field. So I was looking at the road and I saw all these shoe prints of the other farmers who had been working that day. And I realized that though I didn't care about this at all, I recognized all the treads.
[00:17:01] I knew the brands by the treads of shoes. I was walking by the treads of the shoes that I was seeing in this dirt road. And that blew my mind away because I, fashion is just not, something that is super important to me or I spend a ton of time learning about. So here I was. Just through subliminal advertising adverse the amount of advertising out in the world I knew the exact shoe treads I was looking at which ones were Vans or Adidas or Converse or whatever and that Was mind blowing to me because I think at the same time I was I was either taking permaculture like this wilderness tracking class I may have been in both And in this tracking class, we were learning how to track, wild animals by their scat, by their paw prints.
[00:17:47] We spent one day going to a local creek after it had been raining. I think we just went to Boulder Creek. We just walked there from our classroom. And we... saw raccoon prints, and there was a mom, and then we figured out there were two babies, and saw this whole story play out. And our, we had this brilliant teacher who really let us investigate, and he slowly, was able to explain the story of how you could tell what was going on, just through looking at these prints in the mud.
[00:18:13] And it was so beautiful. But it made me realize, Probably most of us could recognize other people's shoe treads in the street, but how many of us could recognize coyote scat versus fox or raccoon, or squirrel, or rabbit, or deer. How many of us could track their prints? How many of us could identify just five plants that are native to our region?
[00:18:39] Or five plants that grow in our neighborh neighborhood? How many of us could name five constellations? Or could tell you the direction by looking at the orientation of the sun? Probably very few of us, because We have grown up in a culture that dismisses the importance of these things, and Sure, maybe in theory we don't all need to know this for our quote unquote survival.
[00:19:08] However, I think these things tell us a lot more than just helping us survive, if we were like hunting them or something or for whatever other reason. These things make us feel connected to our landscape. They help position us in the more than human communities we inhabit. They help us acknowledge our heritage and our ancestry.
[00:19:35] They help us to develop greater care for the animals and the plants in the world around us. And this is super important. When we do this, we recognize, the reason why our holidays tend to all be around solar holidays, right? Why we have holidays around the equinoxes and the solstices and the cross quarter days.
[00:19:56] And if you
[00:20:00] don't know what those were. I didn't know that the equinox was quite literally, mathematically, geographically, on a physical level, when the sun. is out or exposed for equal amount of time that it's not. We have equal amount of day, equal amount of night, or that the solstice is the exact opposite. The winter solstice being the longest night, literally, and the summer solstice being the longest day, or the cross quarter days, which fall perfectly in between the equinoxes and the solstices.
[00:20:31] And this is where all our holidays come from, right? Whether whatever culture you come from, A lot of them or most of them are based on solar and or lunar holidays. And so if you look into Christmas, for example Christmas is around the winter solstice, which is usually around the 21st. So the day after the solstice is quite literally when the sun starts coming out again for a longer and longer time every single day until midsummer, the summer solstice, which is usually right around June 21st.
[00:21:02] And. It's so beautiful when we recognize this, when we see how Egyptians, one of the earliest civilizations of humanity, how they tracked these days and created these holidays, and then how that influenced Greek and Roman culture, how that influenced cultures all over the world. And, again, this connects us back to our heritage.
[00:21:25] This connects us back to something greater than ourselves. It places us within a community. Because not only is this something that Our ancestors celebrated and documented and lived their lives around, but the entire natural world lives around these cycles. And this is something you see especially when you get into herbal medicine, or if you grow foods of your own, if you forage for food or medicine, you'll see that the natural world It moves with these same cycles, and seasonally, we tend to need the exact foods and medicines that grow in that season of the year.
[00:22:05] For example, you may have heard me talk about this before. But for example, what do we always talk about in the spring? Spring cleaning, right? We're always talking about spring cleaning, cleansing and detoxifying and and cleaning everything out, getting rid of anything we don't want, releasing and letting it go so that we can move into the new year, move into the summer with vibrancy and radiance and vitality and energy, right?
[00:22:30] Spring cleaning. Guess what? The exact plants that grow in spring seasonally. All over the world, but I'll just refer to North America here are cleansing plants, especially alternatives. Alternatives work with the elimination pathways in the body. The lymphatic system, the respiratory system, the digestive system, the urinary system, right?
[00:22:52] All systems that play a huge role in detoxification and elimination. And some of the plants that you might know or notice that grow in your area around this time, Her dandelions, chickweed, cleavers, violets, right? These all do those things. These all work with those systems, and they can be made into yummy foods like pestos or spring vinegars by just infusing them in apple cider vinegar.
[00:23:18] They can be made into teas, into tinctures, and This is the spirit of folk medicine because there are traditions of working with seasonal herbs and bioregional herbs, meaning herbs that grow in your region for longer than we have a written record, right? And we can see animals do these same things.
[00:23:36] Other animals carry this same wisdom. Another example of seasonal medicine is in winter, right? So in winter, like in theory, in the northern hemispheres where it's going to be getting cold, it's getting darker and darker, so we're going to be less and less physically active outside. It's a time where we will be resting more and it's more cold.
[00:23:56] So what grows in that time and what do we harvest just before winter sets in? We harvest roots. That's what we, that's what we pick and gets really lush in the fall. In the fall we get lots of starchy squashes and starchy roots and tubers and guess what those do. Those help to really nourish and satiate us and help us prepare for this incoming cold and dark winter.
[00:24:18] And they provide a bulk, a great amount of food that really can be stored for quite a while. And that's another example of seasonal medicine. And this happens year round, and depending on the culture you come from, there's usually four or five seasons acknowledged. And so a nature connection can look a lot of different ways.
[00:24:38] And these are just a couple of the ways. One of the other, I think, big... pieces to acknowledge with this kind of concept of nature connection is really shifting our perspective. We have grown up in a culture that doesn't really give us any kind of sense of belonging to the world that we inhabit. It's almost seen as like a blank canvas that we're living on and writing on versus A complex and bio diverse world that we are born into.
[00:25:12] And so I think, and especially with kind of the doom and gloom narrative that's out there right now about the climate crisis and just the way that we've grown up, our perspectives, our brains are wired to notice Things that aren't nature, right? It's wired. We're wired to notice shoe treads or in my case I think I was really I felt so frustrated By like I don't want to say the way we built cities But I just didn't feel like things were being built and constructed in a way That kind of matched the environment, right?
[00:25:47] When we build houses, we don't orient them towards the sun so that they're being heated through passive solar techniques, like so many cultures before us have done. We build them in whatever way is cheapest, frankly. But, so I had this like negative perspective and I noticed that when I was living in the redwoods I would be driving along these roads and there would be these huge gorgeous redwood trees hundreds and hundreds of feet tall towering over me where I could only see a sliver of the sky and yet so much of the time as I would be driving along the road I would be noticing the power lines.
[00:26:23] But and I would have just like this negative attitude because I would feel so disconnected. And One day as I was driving I had been doing all this mindfulness work and all this work of just like spending time in the woods foraging going for walks sitting outside my garden or doing yoga or meditating outside and hiking trails and One day I realized as I was driving that I was I completely didn't even see the power lines anymore all I could see was the redwoods and That for me, I think, made me realize that sometimes one of the biggest barriers that gets in our way from feeling connected to nature is simply that we need to shift our focus.
[00:27:03] Yes, the pavement is still going to be there, the power lines are still going to be there, but so are the trees. And if we can focus on the trees more, That can quite literally calm our nervous system down. It helps us to feel safe. When we feel connected to the earth, we feel safe. Our nervous system feels calm and regulated and safe.
[00:27:24] And we feel like we belong. Another time I was hiking on this really beautiful trail by the ocean, again, up in the Redwoods. It's one of my favorite trails. And I, could smell redwood violets. And if you know what wild violets or redwood violets look like, you know that they're tiny. Like a flower is maybe the size of my pinky nail.
[00:27:44] They're really small. And I couldn't see redwood violets anywhere, but I could smell them. And as I kept walking up this trailhead, finally I turned a corner and I saw just one. Just one teeny tiny redwood violet on this trail, which there were so many other plants. And again, it showed me, in the same in the same vein or lesson I learned from the shoe treads, it showed me that my body, there was a wisdom inside me, my senses, my body, Recognize this, my body was wired for this, even though I didn't logically know there were redwood violets, that this particular food, this particular medicine, that grew in my region, I didn't logically know those were there, I hadn't seen them there before, but my nose sensed it.
[00:28:34] Because I had been experimenting with them, I had tasted them before, so my brain, my body, quickly picked this up and learned it, and boom, there I was hiking and my body knew this medicine was there before I even saw it. That's nature connection. It can be that simple. And what a beautiful experience. If you're someone who needs to root this into the science, totally understand.
[00:28:58] I had to start there too, because like I said, we... If you are currently living in a culture, in a paradigm, that is very focused on a particular type of evidence and logic and often greets anything outside of that with skepticism, if that's how you feel, that is so fine, start there. And you can start there and, learn about your senses or your olfactory system and why it's as powerful as it is.
[00:29:27] You can learn about the particular constituents or terpenes that you're smelling in the redwood violets and. What that smell means or what that taste means on a chemical level and how that indicates what the medicine that offered is. There's ways to get really technical with it or, if that's not your thing you can just ease into it.
[00:29:47] You can just embrace how simple. Spending time outside is how simple it is to go get a little sunshine, to try and turn your lights off at night when the sun goes down, maybe just one day a week. Then two days a week. Then three or four days a week, and see how that affects you. If you are someone who is menstruating, notice how that affects your cycle, if at all.
[00:30:09] If you are someone who struggles with chronic insomnia, notice how that affects your sleepiness. Notice how that affects your ability to fall asleep and stay asleep. There are so many. Little things like this that we can do to completely shift our experience that can completely shift some of the symptoms we struggle with chronic illness.
[00:30:29] And I like to start here because these things are accessible to everyone. Sometimes we need a top down approach, sometimes we need really intensive medical intervention, and sometimes... Or a lot of the time, we often need both, but a lot of the time, the thing that so many of us are missing are the basics, are getting that sunshine, getting enough darkness at night, eating plenty of fresh and diverse foods, tapping into what foods actually make us feel good, learning about plants in our environment, learning about what holidays were important to our culture and why learning the names of a few Native bees, because honeybees aren't even native here.
[00:31:12] As if you listen to episode one there are so many really cool native insects. And I think that is actually an important one for Limeys, because I think some of us can develop a fear. Or, a lot of us develop a major fear of ticks, of blood sucking insects, a lot of us are really scared of like spiders and snakes, and this is a really great area to try and befriend the beast.
[00:31:40] Learn the names of these things. Try and develop a connection. And maybe that's not the place for you to start. Any of these topics that I've talked about so far are places that you can start. Nature connection can literally mean just going outside Getting under the sun and doing two minutes of breath work, right?
[00:32:00] Getting connected to your nervous system, getting a sense of what plants are growing in the air around you if any, if you live near any green space getting connected to your breath and to your body in that way. Maybe you start going for barefoot walks every day. Or, if that's not accessible to you, just getting your feet barefoot on the ground for ten minutes a day while sitting, or meditating, or just relaxing and reading a book.
[00:32:28] There are so many different ways to approach this. One of my favorite memories was, I used to be a counselor at a kids farm camp in Colorado. And I did this for four years, and the last year I created a teen camp that was super fun. We had a lot of the same kids that came back every single year, which I loved.
[00:32:51] These kids were so special. They still are so special to me. And it was so cool to see them grow up and how their relationship to nature and to growing food evolved and just seeing them find joy in this and doing the butter dances. We made butter and picking flowers for them to put on their bread.
[00:33:09] It was such a special experience and I wanted to incorporate a sit spot with the kids at farm camp because I knew there are so many benefits for adults for anyone really to having this quiet time, especially quiet time out in nature where you can just be quiet and observe. And It was so cute because one of the little girls, I think it was Callie, wrote this really sweet poem, and she said, I hear the rush of the river.
[00:33:36] I see only nature. I feel the tickling grass under my legs and the cool kiss to my fingers from the river. I smell a mix of flowers and trees and leaves, and because of this, I never want to leave. And she was maybe 10 years old. She was so young, there were all these kids, and you can hear just what spending a little bit of quiet time in nature did for them.
[00:34:01] I actually had, we had them make nature journals, and we, they got a little more fancy for the teen camp, but they were allowed to do anything they wanted in this. We learned and wrote down local plant names, we... drew pictures of the plants, we learned ways that the plant could be used or they could go out and just sit in their sit spot and journal.
[00:34:19] This is when she wrote her little poem. Or they could just sit there and watch nature or examine a blade of grass. It was just this quiet time for them to sit. And if this is something that sounds interesting to you, I highly recommend you try it. One of... Yes, I'm just going to leave that there.
[00:34:37] I highly recommend you try it. To close out this episode, there are a couple of takeaways of things that I want, or that you can try. Little pieces of homework, or just fun experiments or exercises that you can take home and start practicing today. So the first one was that sit spot. The next two are these.
[00:34:56] One is observing. And the second is a nature journal. So observation is extremely important. This is something that I learned from the owner of the farm, who he was a chef and was all into the veggie and the food side of things. And he always talked about observing is the first rule as a farmer is just to observe and see what my permaculture teacher also talked about this. This is one of the first rules, or the first rule of permaculture, is to simply observe the environment. To go to the same spot every day, for a year, for however long, and see what's there. See how the light changes, see how the plants change, what animals come and go, how the water level changes.
[00:35:36] There's so much to witness, and there's so much you can learn from this. And just that simple act of sitting and observing, like I've been saying does so much for your body. From calming the nervous system to boosting immunity the physical benefits are really quite tangible, which of course then affect us mentally and emotionally.
[00:35:55] And probably the most important who I really, person who I really learned this practice of observing from is my granddad. My granddad, One of my favorite things about him is that he always has had these just brilliant, mesmerizing, capture your attention nature stories. And there's several that are my favorite stories he would tell, but he would spend so much time just sitting and observing the land around him.
[00:36:24] So every year he knew where the eagle nests were, he would always be the first one to spot a fox or a pileated woodpecker or a deer. I just had these wonderful stories about seeing so many monarch butterflies, an entire tree bowed over, of watching a bald eagle catch a fish, drop it in the water, and then instead of picking it back up, just waiting in a tree limb for the current to bring the fish back to the eagle, instead of doing the extra work, just letting that current bring the fish, and then dropping down and grabbing it again.
[00:37:00] And I learned... From him that when you're patient, when you just sit and watch, you will see amazing things and incredible things. You will know where to find the fish. You will know where to find the plant that you need. You will know... where to find whatever it is that you're looking for because you have been sitting and observing and you will understand when something happens, maybe some of the reasons why it's happened.
[00:37:28] So that's the second thing for you to try is first was the sit spot. Second is Just observing, just learning to notice, and that's it. Learn to notice what's in your environment, and you can even just pick one thing, make it a goal to learn five constellations, or make it a goal to learn three local native plants.
[00:37:50] Always be sure you get super familiar and understand exactly how to ID a plant and whether it's okay to forage it. before you do and it can be that easy. So that's the second one. Or learn how to ID different types of clouds and what that might mean about the weather. There's so many fun and cool things that you can learn and choose from.
[00:38:07] The third thing is, or, sorry, or you can choose to learn about... The solar holidays and do a deep dive and figure out what your culture celebrated and why and begin observing that shift of the light throughout the year and just learn those solar holidays and observe how the light changes or you can do this with lunar holidays and observe how the moon changes.
[00:38:31] Okay, the third thing is keep a nature journal. This, they're all fun, they're all important and they all tie together. I think these are... That's definitely the first three places to start if you want practices to get you more engaged and connected to nature and to your local ecosystems. But the third one, I don't want to say it's my favorite, but it's my favorite and that's keeping a nature journal.
[00:38:54] And there's lots of ways that you can do this. You can literally just keep a note on your phone or like a doc in Google drive where you just write the date down, right? So July 14th spotted the first fig eater beetle of the year or. May 3rd, the coral tree bloomed and Orioles are here. I saw the first male Oriole, or I heard the first male Oriole of the year.
[00:39:18] An Oriole is a bird, a type of bird. These are things that are from my nature journal. So you can make it easy like that, where you just do a bullet point. I think that's a great place to start. And then over the years, you'll notice patterns, right? Rachel Carson talked about this in her landmark book, Silent Spring, right?
[00:39:33] When you're not hearing insects anymore after being DDT disprayed. If you don't take the time to notice and listen these things, to record these things, then you won't notice when they change or when something goes awry, especially due to human, Intervention, right? That's disrupting a local ecosystem, like in the case of the DDT.
[00:39:53] This year, one of the big things I noticed was we had an unusually rainy spring and early summer here in southwestern California. And so much was behind and some things are early. A lot of trees and veggies were blooming late, like the jacarandas trees, these big, beautiful purple trees all bloomed about a month late this year, compared to normal years, or a standard year.
[00:40:15] The fig eater beetles actually also came out much later than usual, which, both of those things bumped me out, because I get excited every year, because I know what to expect, because I've been paying attention for such a long time, and, after years of Observing and learning and noticing these things, then starting to keep an actual nature journal.
[00:40:32] And spiders, spider webs, spiders are out way early this year. Usually they don't start until September, October. And they came out more than a month early this year. And they are everywhere. If I walk anywhere right now, I am getting a cobweb to the face. I have just learned to embrace it, or to wave my arms out in front of me like a weirdo, because some of these...
[00:40:52] Some of these are large. Learning these things, you know what to expect, and it gets exciting. And then you start to understand this is why spiders and cobwebs are part of Halloween or Samhain decorations, because that's actually the natural time that they come out of the year, right?
[00:41:08] Spring showers. Oh, because it's rainy in the springtime, because that's when all these lush greens come out that are super nutritive and cleansing after a winter of kind of rest and not doing a whole lot. We start to learn and understand what's happening around us, and Nature Journals, like I said, you can just do a little fun bullet list or you can do voice notes even, whatever floats your boat, whatever feels easy to you, or If you are like creative and artistic and you want something a little more tangible and tactile and sensory, you can create an actual physical journal like I did with the kids and teens at camp.
[00:41:41] You can get whatever little notebook feels good to you, something you have on hand. You can take little specimens, maybe if you find a particular interesting leaf you want to tape in or trace on a page. You can draw pictures of things. You can write notes. So if you spot a certain bird, you can note.
[00:41:58] that there was a male and two females or you can note when this pair of these birds were nesting and figure out what calls they make and write those in there with dates and then you can compare it year to year. There are so many fun things that you can put in your nature journals. This is a really fun exercise to do with kids if you have kids but this is just fun for everyone.
[00:42:18] You do not have to be a kid. So these are three ways, three practical tools that are Just amazing avenues for getting more connected to nature and the living world around us, because this is so important for all of us, but especially in this time where there is such an increased incidence of chronic illness.
[00:42:38] Remember, one in two people in the United States has chronic illness, four in ten have multiple chronic illnesses, and we are also experiencing the global catastrophe of the climate crisis. Nature connection is more important now than ever, and we have never been as disconnected. as we are right now.
[00:42:55] And these avenues of learning to observe, of learning to just hang out in a sit spot, and learning to actually start recording what we're noticing and seeing and experiencing in a nature journal, whether that's on a literal level of taking notes or drawing pictures or writing poems or whatever. These things help reconnect us back to ourselves, our communities, and the living world around us.
[00:43:21] To our heritage, and to the more than human world, to more than human communities. And as I said, this is more important than ever. Because the journey to healing is a mutualistic endeavor between all of us, that will take all of us. So I'm so grateful that you are here walking the path with me. If you're one of those people who is living with chronic Lyme or chronic illness and you feel ready to take your power back, to begin healing, to reconnect to yourself and nature and to find your shine again, try the three exercises I mentioned above.
[00:43:54] Just pick one, make it easy, make it fun and make it exciting for you. Subscribe podcast. Believer of you and head to the show notes to access my website where you can book a one on one call with me And we can talk about what's going on for you and how you can start to make big change happen in your life Ultimately, this podcast is rooted in the intention to help you feel empowered, embodied, and connected to yourself, your community, your culture, your local ecosystems, and the world at large.
[00:44:24] Because when we remember and when we reconnect, when we begin to work with our bodies and with nature, Healing becomes inevitable. Our bodies are a direct reflection of the ecosystems we inhabit, and just like this earth, our bodies know how to heal.