Journaling Nature's Journey

Welcome back to Wildly Unplug—where we share stories of nature, art, and conservation. Today, I’m excited to give you a behind-the-scenes look at a memorable experience I had presenting Tide Lines: Journaling Nature’s Journey at the National Association for Interpretation (NAI) Conference in the beautiful city of St. Augustine, Florida in December, 2024. 

Lauren’s Top Tip for Connecting with Nature:

🔌Don't overthink it. Whether you’re nervous about drawing or unsure what to write, just dive in. You’ll be amazed at the stories you uncover and the memories you create.

Like my own 16-year-old, who was so worried about researching the St. Louis Arch from his hotel room. It wasn’t until he went outside, explored, and experienced it firsthand that his project came alive—and earned him a perfect score.

Nature is waiting. Grab your journal, take a breath, and see what develops. 🌿

Let’s hear your story! Click here to submit your tale.

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Transcript

  

 Welcome back to Wildly Unplug. My name is Lauren and we are sharing stories. Of nature, art and conservation Today. I'm excited to share a special recording with you. On December 5th, 2024, I had the honor of presenting Tide Lines journaling Nature's Journey at the National Interpreters Association Conference in the beautiful St.

Augustine, Florida. What makes this moment extra special and memorable is everything that was happening behind the scenes. I had just wrapped up my artist residency in the Great Smoky Mountains. Literally just a few days later, I got to be home for what felt like all of five minutes before I had to pack my husband up and he was starting a new job in Key West.

And as fate would have it, I already had this speech lined up and we. Made a little detour to St. Augustine right along the way, and then I got to share this talk with an incredible crowd of passionate interpreters. Full transparency. Listening back, I can kind of hear the nerves in my voice, and it all been a whirlwind.

And then standing there in the whole mix of excitement and exhaustion, and it ended up being great practice and the audience was so kind and welcoming. I am grateful for the experience and thrilled to share it here with you today. So here it is. Tide lines, journaling, nature's journey. My presentation, exploring how nature journaling connects us and helps us dive deeper into exploring nature.

I hope you enjoy it, nerves and all. Let's dive in.

Welcome to Tide Line's journaling, nature's journey. My name is Lauren Connolly, and before we get started, our exits are gonna be behind you. Restrooms are gonna be out the door and to the right. This is gonna be a 20 minute presentation. I'm gonna let you know a little bit about myself, what is nature journaling, how to get started, and a little storytelling about how nature journaling can connect us with the outdoors.

And how to get started in your sphere of influence. The key takeaways from this talk are going to be exploring different forms of creative expression and storytelling through different mediums, enhanced observation skills, and using nature journals for educational advocacy and conservation actions. 

Like I said, my name is Lauren Connelly, I've got a BA in Maritime Studies, I am an open water scuba instructor, I'm a drone pilot, I am a certified interpretive guide, a wildlife rehabber naturalist, and I just recently got certified through Wild Wonder Foundation as a nature journaling educator.  We only protect what we love, we only love what we understand, and we only understand what we're taught.

Jacques Cousteau. And he is one of my heroes, and I love this quote, because I worked in an aquarium setting for 16 years. And I started out on the floor at, like, the touch pool, and we had things like spider crabs and horseshoe crabs, and they're kind of icky and scary if you don't understand them. So I absolutely love that moment when somebody goes from being scared, To understanding and then thinking, oh man, this animal's really cool.

And I want to see more of them. Where can I find them out in the wild? That's my absolute favorite moment. And eventually I worked my way up, or I guess, underwater. And I was giving a lot of my speeches from inside a shark tank. And I am a little bit nervous. I'm a little bit of a fish out of water right now.

I'm more used to being surrounded by sharks giving my presentation than I am on land. You know, how many of us grew up on Jaws and I was afraid to go in the pool as a kid and I got to teach people all about how sharks are really cool and it's more scary or scarier to have a world without sharks than it is to have a world with sharks. 

In 2020, in February, I went to Chicago, and I got certified as an interpretive guide, and that was the last thing I did before the world shut down.  And when I got the certification, I realized just how much I love storytelling and how much I was missing that in my role at the Aquarium. I was working about 50 to 60 hours a week.

I was available to volunteers 24 7. I was doing a lot of paperwork. I was doing a lot of gear maintenance. And I was missing that part in my life, so I went part time. And the timing on that was impeccable because all the part time people were furloughed. And I went months without, uh, working. And that gave me time and space to be outside.

And it was a very personal and very healing experience for me. This is at Red River Gorge in Kentucky. I finally picked up my 16 years. And I was so afraid to even draw on my journal, I did it on the inside cover. And that's just squiggles.  That might not look like anything to you guys, but to me, I remember feeling the warmth of the sun on the sandstone and how it felt like sand is crumbling away from the rock.

How the ale ate tasted, the little lizards slithering around on the, you know, the ground and everything. Like, I remember this moment so clear, so when I picked up my journal a couple years later, I'm like, wow. Nature journaling has something here, like that really connected me to nature, it was very healing, and I wanted to spread that message  more, so I started earlier this year, Wild Development Studio, it's wildlife art and adventure to inspire people to explore outside. 

So what exactly is nature journaling? Well, that's kind of hard to pinpoint and  really, really hard in a 20 minute session. A couple of you guys have probably been to a couple other nature journaling sessions today, wildwonder. org. Please go to this website. They have a wonderful free resource. It is a very thick book, so many techniques.

Just experiment with it. Um, but John Muir Laws is the best in, in nature journaling. It is the practice of using your words, pictures, numbers to collect and record your observations, questions, connections. Explanations on the pages of a notebook. You don't need to be an artist or a naturalist to begin.

These skills can be learned by anyone, and you can develop them with deliberate practice.  So many benefits. We know some of them, I'm sure. It can sharpen your observation skills. You can notice patterns, changes in nature, like with the seasons. You connect with nature and build a bond with the environment.

It's great for your mental health. You've got forest bathing. You've got grounding. It can fuel your creativity. You can explore and experiment with writing and drawing and painting in ways that maybe you never thought before. As my personal example earlier, enhanced memory. Putting that pencil to paper is going to make that connection in your brain.

You're going to remember it better than if you just took a picture. Encourage curiosity. You're going to ask questions more about the ecosystem. And once you learn about it and you care about it and understand nature, you're going to want to conserve it.  Support physical activity. It involves outdoor exploration, and you can track growth and change, not just in nature, but also for yourself as well.

And it also helps to build community. It is absolutely amazing that you can take a group of kids out on a trail, the same trail they've been on, over and over and over again, and all 15 of them will document something different on their experience. And sharing that helps to build a bond with each other.

So the main purpose of nature journaling, it's slowing down, it's observing and creating a connection with the world around you. None of this information is new, I didn't discover it. I like to think of myself as kind of like a canary to remind you to get outside and get some fresh air.  And what I absolutely love about nature journaling is it can be as big or as small as you want.

You can just take a piece of paper, I have some of those in the back if you guys want them, and a pencil. You can take this and you can go outside and you can start exploring for yourself. I also do a program called Earth and Easel and that middle picture there.  I provide a clipboard, watercolor pencils, and a couple other tools so people can go out.

It's really handy to go explore out in nature. And you can go even bigger and you can use flashlights and magnifying glasses and tools to help you press leaves. So you can, again, go as big or as small as you want. It depends on your budget and where you want to get started. And sometimes it can be a little overwhelming.

Oh, also, cell phones. It is greatly debated. Can I even use my cell phone when I'm out there? These things are a great, big source of distraction. So, what I would say, because I use my phone all the time. This one time, I saw this turtle. I think it was getting fed by the park workers there. It was very curious and checking me out.

I didn't know what kind it was, so I got a picture of it. And I decided to paint it later on. And I got to observe later, like, oh, why is the moss growing on that side of his shell? What type of species is it? And I was able to look at the patterns and discover it's a river cooter. So, you can use your phone for that.

Um, also on the sheets that are back there,  there are a couple really great tools that you can use for nature journaling. Like the Merlin Bird ID. It will use your phone to listen and tell you, Oh, this is a cardinal or something like that. Also, um, there's tools that will tell you when the tides are. Um, also trails and downloading trails so you can know where you're going and seek is a great one too.

There's a whole bunch of great ones. My suggestion is don't text. Don't do social media when you're using your phone when you're nature journaling.  Where do you even begin? Sometimes when you're staring at a blank piece of paper, it can be really overwhelming and you just want to give up. I had Claire Walker Leslie on my podcast on episode 19.

She's been doing nature journaling for longer than I've been alive. She's published 15 books on the subject, and I asked her that very question, where do we start? And she said, just start with the date. Once you start getting something on the page, then your creativity is going to start to flow. There are some prompts to also get you started, I think.

What do I think about these trees? What do I wonder about them? And it reminds me of  There are all sorts of styles for nature journaling. You can write your facts about an animal or a plant, your feelings, poetry, drawing, mapping, a cross section, counting, you can do music, you can zoom in on an object, zoom out your imagination.

There are so many ways, and that, um, wildwonder. org with that free book to download has so many great options for you to use. Um, the Picture in the middle there. That was a sound map. So we closed our eyes were listening and what did we hear and they mapped it out on the page.  You can see an example of zooming in and I wonder like what kind of leaf is turning red in the summertime.

So all sorts of things that you can do  when I'm with little kids. I usually like to start with a book that kind of sets up our day. And there's a really great one. I'll put it in the um, question section of this talk. So you guys can look it up too. Because nature journaling requires you to be quiet in nature.

And if you go tell a child, you know,  go sit for five minutes. They'll be like, why? What's in it for me? Right? Um, so I developed a sit spot and over time you come up with stories. And you have some really cool experiences. You share those experiences with the kids. Like, I was at a conference in Ohio, and there was a pileated woodpecker.

I kept hearing, all conference long, I'm like, where is this thing? And I finally took a minute to sit on this rock, and I saw the pileated woodpecker. And then a couple minutes later, a deer came up and was so close to me, and I didn't know they do something they call blow, and they make a raspberry sound, and then it ran away.

I had no idea it did that. So collect stories like that to share with the kids so that they have a reason to go and want to sit. Because they don't realize that when you're quiet in nature, that's when nature starts to come out and reveal itself to you.  At the very end of our sessions, we always share what we learned.

And again, it's really cool to see 15 kids all experience something different even though we're all together in the same area. And we all learn from each other.  It does help to build our observation skills. Um,  here's kind of an example of using the smaller end of nature journaling. We got a small journal and just markers.

I don't use a lot of tools, tools with the kids because It's going to get lost in the woods, you know. So, we finally discovered every time it rains and we're out on the trail, there's a turtle that comes out. And we saw him so much this summer, we named him Mr. Shellington. And this little girl was so sad that we had to leave Mr.

Shellington alone in the woods. She had that connection with him now. And one of the other students suggested, oh, why don't you journal about it?  And totally stopped the tears and we've got a smile now because she got to document her experience with Mr. Shellington.  I also do a program called Earth and Easel.

On this particular  session, I was with a group called The Crew at The Grail. And it's teenagers. Kids are easy. If they're not having fun, we'll play a game or something. I'm like, ah, teenagers, this is going to be hard. So I used that, uh, the bigger kit with the watercolor pencils and the clipboards. And We spent an hour just sitting in the woods and after an hour and the bell went off, they're like, can we please stay longer?

This is so much fun. And I'm like, yeah, okay. So we stayed for 10 more minutes. And after 10 minutes was up, can we please stay longer? I'm like, we still have a little bit of time. Sure, we'll stay a little bit longer. So to get, you know, little kids engaged, but then also teenagers engaged and wanting to do this and Talking about how much fun it was and how relaxing it was.

It was a really cool experience and here's some of their examples here.  Uh, just last month I was the artist in residence at the, um, Smoky Mountains National Park and I had to do a visitor engagement.  So I did kind of the same thing I do for Earth and Easel with watercolor pencils and the clipboards and allowed people to go outside and explore using these tools.

But then I also had a four foot by five foot canvas. And if people wanted to draw directly on the canvas, what they think, uh, what they wonder, or what the natural park reminds them of, then I let them draw directly on the canvas. If they didn't want to do that, I let them draw on the paper and then glue it onto the canvas.

And I told them if they like it, you know, you can take a picture and you can keep that memory forever. If you don't, just forget it even happened. But at the Oconaluftee Visitor Center, it was really cool to see that a lot of the images that people were drawing. Elk and the historical buildings  and the chickens that were running around the park. 

When I went over to Sugarlands, sorry, Sugarlands Visitor Center, a lot of the things people were drawing were bears, were the birds. And we had visitors as old as 80 years old and as young as 8 months. I mean,  the kid was just scribbling on it, but you know, the kid got to enjoy and engage in this piece of art work too. 

And this is what the final product ended up looking like, and it was really cool for all of us to talk about what we thought of the park and people were coming up and pointing at different things and, and saying, Oh, I didn't know we had elk here. And where can I find the elk? So it was just a really neat experience  in the summer of 2023.

It was my first full summer at my new house, and I wanted to do something with my nature journal. And I'm like, you know, summer's almost over. I've got some trees. I want to document how they're going to change during the fall. I just did this for myself for fun. It's another really cool thing about nature journaling is you don't know how it's going to affect you or what change you're going to make.

So I did this. It was sitting in my room for a little while.  And then I had to do a capstone for the Wild Wonder Nature Journal activity. And I noticed we had some baby maples growing in our garden that we're going to inevitably get pulled because they're too close to the house. And we've got a real big problem with honeysuckle and pear trees and things like that.

And our local parks are really good about going in and removing the honeysuckles, but then we don't replace it with anything. So for my capstone,  I got to dig up some of these native trees in my yard and put them in the park. So something I just did for fun ended up being a conservation project. Next year it's going to get bigger and better.

We're going to get more people involved. And hopefully it improves the health of our forests.  So how can you bring it to you and bring it into your sphere of influence? Well, nature is everywhere. I've heard a couple people today say, Well, I work in the city and there's no nature there.  There is nature.

You just gotta look for it. It might look a little bit different than what we traditionally think of as nature. Sometimes you can even bring it inside to you. Um, Monarch Watch is a great place where you can get, um, Monarch Caterpillars mailed to you and you can have them in your classroom and the students can watch them grow. 

You gotta make it a habit. If you don't schedule time to do it, you're probably not gonna do it. Minimize distractions. People are looking for ways to unplug.  And you can go, again, as big or as small as you want. You can do a piece of paper and a pencil, or you can do bigger supplies.  There are research and studies online, so if you are going back and forth with your boss and they don't want to bring that program into your school,  find those studies, show them the evidence.

Um, you can also do something like a lunch and learn. If you get the teachers involved in their own, um, Nature journaling session. Then I think, oh, this is really cool. This is really relaxing. I like this. I see the value in it now. That's something that, uh, the Loveland Learning Garden is struggling with.

They don't see the, the teachers during the day don't see the value in it. They'll do it as an after school program, but they're not incorporating it during their normal studies.  Um, let's see.  And you can see some of the smiling faces. A lot of the, um, teachers have told me. And this is just for the after school program, but they've said that these kids that usually aren't engaged in the activities during the after school program when we're doing the nature journaling, they're excited, they're engaged.

And I did have to reframe what that even looked like because I was thinking, you know, I'm going to get all these kids to sit quietly and journal. Well, that didn't work out too well. So we were like running through the woods and drawing at the same time. So you might have to reframe what that looks like depending on their activity level because it's the end of the school day.

I get it. They just want to have fun.  Um, here's Monarch Watch. So again, another way that you can bring nature inside to you. And I ended up doing a picture showing all the stages. And that could be something cool that your kids can do too. It's document the different stages. If you want to get it started just for yourself, and, um, I suggest doing a travel journal.

Very similar to a nature journal.  And,  we, we collect so many things. And, eventually it's, where did I even get this? I don't even remember this trip. But, I remember the rainy afternoon that my niece and I were painting palm trees. And all the games we played. And, so, Again, taking the time to slow down and putting paper or paint,  paint to paper will really help to engage that memory. 

Uh, one last story before we go and it's about my 16 year old son, so don't tell him because he would kill me.  He had to do like a video journal for a school project on the St. Louis Arch. And we got there and he is on his computer.  Staring at the arch from the hotel room. And he's like, I gotta do more research.

I can't, I can't go until I research more. I'm like, Connor, we're here. Go out and explore. Nothing that you're gonna find online, you'll find the same things if you go and explore for yourself. You might even have a better experience. And he ended up getting, uh, over 100 percent on his project. He did a really good job, but he was like, Mom, you were right.

Like, I was waiting. And, you know, sometimes we overprepare instead of just going out and experiencing and doing it. So my suggestion to you is if you're nervous about drawing or painting or journaling, just, just do it. Just try it and see what kind of cool experiences you can have.  And again, like I said, I've got those handouts in the back for you.

I have a little bit about photography in there too.  And then a little sample nature journal that you're welcome to take. And thank you guys so much  and have a good evening. 

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