Noticing Nature Every Day
And some reflections on my eclipse FOMO
What if we hold this reverence for nature every day? What if we focus human ingenuity on preserving life on this magnificent planet? What if we continually embrace awe and each other?
How cool is the universe. How small are we. How wonderful terrifying magical tenuous sweet it is to be alive on this perfect rock zooming through space.
–Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson; on Instagram after the April 8th solar eclipse
On April 8th, instead of gathering with groups of people, all with paper glasses, staring giddily up at the sky awaiting the shadow of the moon passing directly in front of the sun, I was working in a coffeeshop with a friend and looking longingly out at the cloudy, gray sky saying forlornly, “I think the eclipse is happening about now.” The FOMO got really real when I got home and seeing all the unadulterated awe in people’s faces on social media and other news reports.
I have never been able to see a full solar eclipse. When it occurred in Oregon in 2017, I very well could have braved the traffic to drive just a bit south of Portland, alas Finch had just had cleft lip surgery two weeks before which had thrown his little system so out of whack that he was not sleeping at night, and thus no one in our house was sleeping and we were all delirious and there was no way in hell we were going to brave traffic with a five-month-old who hated the car and wasn’t sleeping. However, we were treated to quite an incredible and strange dance of shadows that gave just an inkling of the feel of a total eclipse. It was magical.
Alas, 2024 wasn’t going to be my eclipse-viewing year either. As I had (kind of) gotten over my recent FOMO, I realized how that moment when so many people in our country were looking up at the sky at the same time and reveling in the beauty of a natural occurrence was beautiful in and of itself. I wish we could package the awe and the reverence people had for the eclipse and channel it into the awe and reverence of the everyday occurrences on this planet. And how lucky we are to be on this planet, this “perfect rock zooming through space,” as Ayana Elizabeth Johnson put it.
This kind of awe is special in these rare eclipse moments. But it can be special anywhere, anytime as well.
It so happens that WendyMac’s DrawTogether prompt this week is a practice in finding those special moments of beauty everywhere. “I’m talking about the kind of beauty that catches our eye, tugs on our sleeve, leans in close and whispers, ‘This’,” she wrote in her prompt to GUT subscribers. She goes on:
“When we talk about beauty, we often think of what I’ll call Big Beauty. Big Beauty is a giant, spectacular beauty that overwhelms the senses. Bright pink sunsets and cymbal-filled symphonies. Big clear blue skies and long open highways. I think we can agree that those things are all capital B beautiful. And Big Beauty is great.
But what I am more interested in, and what I think makes our lives immeasurably richer every day, are the smaller, more unexpected moments of color and form, sound and quiet. Pleasant surprises that fill us with wonder. That’s what i’ll call Daily Beauty. Not only do moments of daily beauty make us smile, but taken together they create a full and joyful life. Which is to say a life worth living. And, as artists, daily beauty offers us a life to reflect on.”
What I loved about having this be our prompt during the week of some objectively big beauty in the form of the eclipse, we were tasked to look smaller. Look at the things that not everyone was looking at at the same time.
This is an important task for me because I am not prone to looking at the details of a beautiful thing. I’m the kind of person that loves a hike with a sweeping landscape view at the end where I can just say “daaaaammmnn is the world beautiful” or to seek out a waterfall that I can sit and watch the beauty in its raw power. Yet I am much less apt to stare closely at the moss and notice the order of each of the stems that almost look like tiny little trees. I almost never look deeply at the soil and pay attention to the tiny little beings scurrying around within.
To look closely and deeply at the typically unnoticed beauty of the world, particularly nature, I needed someone to tell me to do it. I had that experience on a field trip I chaperoned a few months ago where my son’s class went out to a nature preserve and learned about nature’s decomposers and dug for bugs. I, along with 20 first-graders and several chaperones and teachers, lifted up logs and dug holes in the mud and looked closely at what might be moving underneath. And I also had this experience with Wendy’s prompt this week.
Daily beauty most certainly doesn’t have to be something specifically of the natural world. One person shared a drawing of a person picking up their dog’s poop and one drew the patterns of an outdoor furniture set. But I couldn’t help but look at nature with spring making it so obvious to me on my daily dog walks. As the week went on, I realized a theme was emerging from my “daily beauty” drawings and it was nature-related. Specifically, it was about the resilience of nature. What struck me as beautiful on my first day was a scene that I often stopped to notice–that is ivy growing on brick walls. It’s art-in-nature to me and reminded me of our Baltimore home and our neighbor’s garage which almost looked more beautiful in the winter when the ivy had lost its leaves, but the vine strands were artful in their resemblance to urban cracks.
But then later in the week I started to notice elements that weren’t likely to be beautiful to someone else if pointed out to them: a lily emerging from an expanse of invasive ivy vines (although maybe that would be objectively beautiful), a bluebell (my husband’s nemesis) emerging from a rock garden, dandelions amidst a well-kept lawn. They were representative of nature doing its thing despite humans trying to control it (or even being unable to control it when it comes to the ivy). It’s something that my eyes tend to skip over unless someone’s lawn has been taken over by weeds or my husband points out how the pesky bluebells are back yet again despite his four-year campaign to rid our yard of them. But nature is resilient.
This is what I noticed in attuning to daily beauty that not only was I seeing things that were, objectively, beautiful (such as the array of flower blossoms blooming all over my neighborhood), but also subjectively beautiful as well (the details in a dandelion).
Don’t get me wrong, I will still very much seek out an expansive view (I do love a view, especially of the Columbia River Gorge) and I’m even tempted to find a way to experience the total eclipse wherever in the world it will happen the next time or the next time after that. But to really appreciate this rock shooting through the universe, I need to slow down and notice the little details more often.
And there’s still time to join us on our preparedness journey! All posts will be available to paid subscribers on the Tools & Resources link at the top of the homepage.
