My love affair with nature

Although I am still ‘taking time out’ in many respects I felt I wanted to write about this theme. I originally thought of writing a book with the above title but decided that it would be far too unwieldy and very pricey to publish. So I decided to make several scrapbooks instead. There is an art to making good scrapbooks and I have made many in the past. This time round I purchased three A4 size scrapbooks with a brown cover and brown pages inside.

I pondered for some time about how to do this but decided that taking specific places like my garden and various nature reserves for each book was the best way. Then came the task of sorting photos for printing. I have thousands of photos on my computer dating from when I had my first digital camera. I also have three or four boxes of photos from before that time.

What I noticed when going through these thousands of photos is that very few were of people or buildings and most were of landscapes and the beasties that live in the landscape. I have found photos of dragonflies taken in 2015, hiding away in a different folder than where they should be. But it has been a wonderful experience looking at the photos and remembering when they were taken and who I was with at that time.

Choosing which photos for the scrapbook is very hard though. I love all my dragonfly, damselfly and butterfly photos so how can I choose just one of each kind? It is the same with the photos of birds feeding in the garden and the many pictures of flowers. I need more ‘time out’ in order to do this but I felt I would like to let you know how I was using my time out.

Taking time out

It is important in the world of today to take time out so that you do not wear yourself out and get too exhausted to do anything. Over this last nine months or so I have been busy trying to help others to see that we need to do something about our planet, like less pollution and thinking about what we wear and what we eat and how we live. On top of this I have had all the usual things to do, housework, washing, gardening and shopping, so now I am beginning to feel that state of exhaustion.

I have arthritis and other muscle problems, something which I think is called polyarthralgia, and this flares every so often whatever medication, including natural remedies, that you take. So it is time for me to step back, to take time out from doing things I don’t have to do and get some rest. Ideally the rest will include sitting outside in nature reflecting on my world.

I see so many people running around doing this and doing that and never taking time to just sit or stand and reflect. Staying busy all the time is not good for us. Our bodies need time to repair as do our mental and emotional bodies. There are challenges ahead for most of us and we need to have the energy to deal with them so resting now as much as possible will be good for me and for everyone else. We will need plenty of energy to deal with what is coming. So this is a short blog post as my time out starts today!

Words and actions

It is very easy to say something about doing something and then do nothing about what you said you’d do. I am writing here about the climate change declarations of emergency which are often said by councils and various organisations. It is easy to say these words of declaring a climate emergency. But what actions are then taken. Locally for example, the council declared the emergency and said they would set up a working party to come up with ideas for action reporting back some time next year. A definite lack of the feeling of emergency and what that actually means.

We all say that we will do things to help with this, but what do we actually do? Do we recycle, do we think about what we buy to eat and wear or use? Do we understand the importance of what we do? Do we think about our actions and how they impact the world for our children and grandchildren? Or do we just keep on living in the same old way without changing anything we do in our daily lives.

There are lots of well known phrases about words and actions. ‘Actions speak louder than words’ is one of these. In some native circles it is known as ‘Walking your talk’. Here is another quote, ‘ Your beliefs become your thoughts, Your thoughts become your words, Your words become your actions, Your actions become your habits, ‘

Also, you are defined by what you do, by your actions, rather than by what you say. Words can often mean nothing at all but actions speak so much louder. So are you all talk and no action of are you one who follows up their words with actions?