Walking in Deerfield Park, I came upon a fallen birch lying among the leaves.

Most of the trunk had disappeared. The wood that remained had separated into long fibers and grown soft, spongy to the touch. The white bark still held the shape of the tree, curling here and there and revealing its warm brown underside. When I fingered the bark, it crinkled.

I looked more closely where the log met the earth. Pill bugs, looking like tiny armadillos, rolled themselves into balls when I gently lifted one edge of the log. Other many-legged creatures disappeared beneath the bark. Fine white threads ran through the decaying wood. Reddish dust had collected in a crevice.

The more I looked, the more I wondered about this birch. I imagined it young and pretty, a slim tree among the darker oaks, maples, and aspens. It grew tall. Its white crown filled with leaves, birds nested in its branches, and snow gathered along its limbs.

Then one spring fewer leaves appeared. The crown thinned. In time the birch died and fell. And here it was many seasons later, its wood softening into the earth while its white bark still held the memory of the tree.

The woods are full of such fallen logs, each telling its own story.

Still, the word decay was too small for what I saw before me. The fallen birch was beautiful. It had answered its call and taken each change as it came.

I began to think of it as the good birch.

Henry David Thoreau understood such things. Speaking to Nature, he wrote:

I omit the unusual—the hurricanes and earthquakes—and describe the common. This has the greatest charm and is the true theme of poetry. You may have the extraordinary for your province, if you will let me have the ordinary. Give me the obscure life, the cottage of the poor and humble, the workdays of the world, the barren fields, the smallest share of all things but poetic perception. Give me but the eyes to see the things which you possess. (1)

The fallen birch was just such a common thing. I had passed countless fallen logs before. This time I had put my hand upon the soft wood, lifted the bark, and looked beneath it. The longer I remained, the more the life of this one tree opened before me.

Give me but the eyes to see, Thoreau asks.

I think of this kind of attention as Natura Divina—a younger sister to Lectio Divina, the ancient Christian practice of lingering prayerfully over a passage of Holy Scripture.

Here, I lingered over the birch. I looked, touched, and wondered. Its soft wood, white bark, pill bugs, silken threads, and reddish dust became the words of a story. Poetic perception gathered these separate details into the life of one tree, and contemplation opened that life toward its Maker.

Nature is not God. The birch remained a creature, bearing the marks of its own small and particular life. Yet as I attended to it, something of the order and generosity of its Maker began to appear.

What I saw was a good birch.

Good in the fulfillment of its life. Good to see. Good as a nesting place and shelter. Good as its fallen leaves fed the brown earth. Good for fungi that draw nourishment from the wood. Good simply because it is.

And good now, lying open and spent upon the earth.

The goodness of creation reaches into and beyond age—and is not diminished by it. I learned that truth first through my senses: the fibers yielding beneath my hand, the bark crinkling at my touch, the small lives disappearing into the wood.

This is why such seeing matters. Attention gives rise to wonder, and wonder deepens into affection. We begin to care for the particular lives we have learned to recognize: this birch, these woods, this river, this bird calling.

Our common home is made of thoroughly common things: trees and stones, mud and water, beetles, fungi, weeds, and fallen leaves.

Natura Divina—the contemplation of creation—begins when we give one of those common things our full attention. We receive it through the senses and allow poetic perception to reveal what it possesses. Through the goodness of the thing made, we turn in wonder toward the Maker.

This is the contemplative gaze: to see almighty everything in a thoroughly common thing.

Sheila Carroll
Living Books Press

1. Henry David Thoreau, Journal, August 28, 1851.
   

   Leave a comment

   Thanks for reading Nature Study Notes. If the good birch brought something new into view, please share this reflection with someone who might enjoy it too.

   Share

   Subscribe free to receive Nature Study Notes each Sunday, or become a paid subscriber to help sustain this work of attention, wonder, and care.

Something has happened to the light this week.

I noticed it first in the late afternoon, when the sun came through the trees behind the house at a lower angle, lighting the leaves with gold. Then I began to notice it at noon. Traveling slant-wise now, its great summer arc is already lower on the horizon.

How I longed for that high noonday sun in March and April! Each week it climbed a little higher, bringing warmth back into the earth. The garden responded. Leaves unfurled. Grass thickened. Birds nested. By June the sun seemed almost to stand over us, pouring down light.

Now, in late August, the light has changed again. And everything seems to know it.

Plants that flowered so freely a few weeks ago are setting seed. Grasses ripen with seed heads. Goldenrod goes to yellow on the edges of roads. The robin will soon be gone-first to come, first to go. Before long, the squirrels will begin caching their nuts.

Insects have their own late-summer music.

The long hot days of August bring the cicadas, almost deafening in the woods behind our house in the evening. Crickets and katydids take up their chirruping in the chorus. A few fireflies still rise from the grass. Bees and other buzzing things move among the flowers that remain.

At dusk I can still walk outside in shorts and a shirt. I revel in the warmth. The pollen-rich air is so thick I can feel it in my mouth—a fullness.

Summer is everywhere. And yet the symphony is moving into a minor chord. There is fullness and fading all at once.

Poetry is the only fitting language for these days—to express the quality of light and the change it brings. Poets have been paying attention to August for since ancient times.

The psalmist tells us that this time of year is crowned with goodness and the fatness of the land.

Thou crownest the year with thy goodness;
and thy paths drop fatness.
They drop upon the pastures of the wilderness:
and the little hills rejoice on every side.
The pastures are clothed with flocks;
the valleys also are covered over with corn;
they shout for joy, they also sing.—Psalm 65:11–13

Gary Snyder, from his lookout point on a mountain, writes a sensory, Zen-like poem, Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout:

Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones.

There is August entire in that glowing pitch: heat stored in matter, the sun drawing fragrance and resin from the trees. The world is full, and already letting go.

Robert Duncan gives us an August of blazing fullness and hidden things:

And over the green fields wilted down
under your blaze, these
thirsty unruly plants grow a jungle domesticity
to protect their fruit.

Of all hidden things, I sing, waiting
for evening’s grace.

The old rhythms of waiting, ripening, gathering, and storing has faded from our ordinary life. Most of us find our food in stores. Strawberries in January. Lettuce that is green in every season. We keep time by store hours.

But August helps us keep time with the seasons. We sense the wide arc of the year now and the flourishing of life.

In the slanting light, fullness and fading come into view together. The world is abundant, and the world is passing. August shows us this.

Soon the robin will leave. Seeds will scatter. Squirrels will bury nuts. The cicadas will grow quiet. Evenings will cool.

This is where we are now, here in Michigan. And it is very good.

If you would like to read more poems that add to your appreciation of the natural world, you will enjoy Nature Poems: Timeless Verse for Children Celebrating Birds, Trees, Sky, and Other Natural Wonders

Sheila Carroll
Living Books Press

Please share your thoughts. Your reflections help all of us see a little better when we’re outside.

Leave a comment

My daughter and her family live on a dusty country road a few miles from town. One afternoon, I drove out to see them and turned up their long dirt driveway. A recent rain had left a wide, shallow puddle in front of the house, the water murky and brown. And there, as if a welcoming party had gathered, small bright yellow butterflies lined its edges, their wings folded primly above their backs. There were at least fifty of them.

It was a surprising sight.

I got out of the car and walked slowly toward them. As I drew closer, I could see their slender proboscises uncoiling like tiny drinking straws, each one reaching down to sip from the mud.

When I took another step, the whole yellow company shot up into the air. For a few moments, I was surrounded by butterflies. Then, as if on cue, they settled again upon the same muddy patch and resumed drinking from the puddle.

Butterflies drink nectar from flowers. I did not know they drank from mud.

My son-in-law saw me observing the butterflies and came out of the house.

“They’re mud-puddling,” he said. “Some butterflies do that because they need the minerals in the dirt.”

That made sense—sort of.

Turns out, the butterflies were sulphurs, and the behavior is known as puddling. Once I learned that, the scene before me began to take on new layers. Although many kinds of butterflies puddle, sulphurs are especially known for gathering on wet ground, and the ones I was watching were probably males who carry it to the females during mating and nourish the eggs.

One butterfly may lead others to a good puddling place. A sulphur sees another drinking from the ground and descends to join it. Before long, the brown mud is alive with yellow wings.

Normally, I would have said, Oh, that explains it. It’s puddling behavior.

Yet even after I knew what the butterflies were doing, I continued to stand there beside the mud puddle.

Butterflies drinking from mud. This was, to me, puzzling behavior.

We carry pictures of the natural world in our minds. Butterflies belong dipping into flowers, sipping nectar. We see one moving through a garden and think, Oh, how pretty. Then we pass on because it is doing what we expect of a butterfly.

The sulphurs interrupted my expectation. Here were creatures I associated with flowers and sunlight gathered around mucky water, drawing salts from the mud.

Oddly, naming the behavior did not explain away my sense of wonder. It heightened it.

Nectar gives the butterfly energy, but it does not give it everything it needs. The damp earth holds minerals that the flower lacks. The male sulphur gathers the minerals, carries them to the female, and into the next generation of sulphers.

Flower, rain, soil, mineral, butterfly, and egg are joined in ways I could not have guessed while watching a sulphur pass by.

My surprise was becoming awe.

Bishop J. E. Mercer wrote in Some Wonders of Matter (1910) that nearly everyone feels a sense of wonder upon encountering something new or strange. The trouble is that this feeling is often no more than surprise. Once the surprise wears off—or an explanation is supplied—we move on.

True wonder goes further.

Mercer distinguished between the question that asks “What use is it?” and the purer wonder that asks, “What is it?” More information does not diminish this kind of wonder; it deepens it. “The more we know, the greater grows the wonder of it all!”

Naming the behavior “puddling” satisfied my initial curiosity. The need for sodium explained what the butterflies were drawing from the mud and what use it had for them. Yet the fact remained: these luminous yellow creatures, which I had always associated with flowers, also belonged beside a muddy puddle.

The explanation had not closed the encounter. It had opened it onto a larger question: Why?

What kind of world is this, in which a butterfly drinks from flowers and mud?

Wonder enters when I realize that the idea of creation I carry is inadequate to the truth. I place the butterfly among flowers because that is where I expect to find it. But the butterfly’s life is wider and more joyful. It joins flower and mud, nectar and mineral, male and female, the living creature before me and a generation yet to come.

Mercer believed facts were only the doorway. He urged readers to “lose themselves in the marvels of God’s works,” to let knowledge lead not to closure but to deeper attention. And the more we attend to a created thing, the more we see something of the wisdom, generosity, and imagination of its Creator.

The sulphurs at the mud puddle gave me a glimpse of the truth. Nothing in the scene was as simple as I had thought—not the butterfly, not the flower, and certainly not the mud.

Slowly, admittedly, with some effort, nature has taught me not to hurry past such moments. I have learned that explanation doesn’t have to be the end of wonder but a beginning.

There are living things near us we have never noticed. One of them may interrupt your expectations this week. When you feel surprise, pause, then let the surprise widen. Learn its name and something about it. Then look again. See if it has something new to teach you.

Today, my sulfur butterflies were a bit of a surprise, yes. But it was wonder— unexpected—that was the real surprise.

If you would like to discover more wonders while walking in the woods or simply playing on the grass with your children, you will find ideas and encouragement here: Nature Study Companion: Simple Ways to Explore Wonders Near and Far.

Sheila Carroll
Living Books Press

Leave a comment

I look out over my garden in its late-summer fullness. The cabbages have become firm, heavy heads. The tomatoes are ripening faster than we can eat them. But the leaves of the butternut squash are already yellowing.

This is the time of year when I begin to reckon with the garden. What grew as I had hoped? What failed? What did I plant too closely or too late? What will I do differently next spring?

In doing this, I take part in an ancient ritual. Farmers have always stood in their fields in late summer, assessing the harvest and measuring what it might provide through fall and winter. Even while gathering this year’s yield, they are thinking about the next.

I am reminded of Aldo Leopold, who writes about his farm in a way that makes you feel you are there.

There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.—A Sand County Almanac (1949)

A garden, even small raised beds like mine, corrects that error. It reminds me that food begins in soil, rain, sunlight, seed, and labor—and that much of what happens between planting and harvest remains beyond my control.

Yet there is something more.

When I stand looking at my garden in the heat of the day, I feel happy. Maybe it is the soil beneath my fingernails. It makes me part of a long conversation that reaches back through all the men and women who have saved seed, turned the soil, watched the sky, waiting for something to grow.

My garden is not a matter of life or death. If the cabbages fail, I can buy a cabbage. Yet I made a garden this year. I participated in something timeless. I placed seeds in the ground and waited. I watched blossoms become fruit. I saw some plants flourish and others fail for reasons I will ponder and remember next year.

Had I not made the garden, I would not have known this feeling of taking part in something ancient—and good. I would have been the poorer for it.

Leopold reminds us that we belong within the life of the land.

Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals.

The garden lets me feel that current moving beneath my own hands. I am not its source. I enter it for a season. I sow and weed, water and gather. Then the plants die back and return to the soil.

There are many ways to take part in this ancient work. We don’t need a garden, though tending one is a lovely task. We need only tend something that grows—a pot of herbs on a windowsill, a tomato plant beside the door, a small patch of earth. We water it, watch it, and learn what it needs. If it feeds us, so much the better. But whether or not it comes to the table, in tending it, we have already been fed.

We can also invite our children into this long conversation with the living world. My guide, Nature Study Companion: Simple Ways to Explore Wonders Near and Far, offers simple ways to begin—right where you are.

Sheila Carroll
Living Books Press

Leave a comment

Each morning, before I make my own breakfast, I make breakfast for someone else.

I put the coffee on to brew, and step outside with a scoop of sunflower seeds. By the time I reach the feeder, I already have company.

Right on cue, the gray squirrel appears. He waits for me to finish serving breakfast and go back inside. Then he launches himself onto the feeder, which immediately tilts sideways under his weight.

Hanging upside down, he stuffs himself with sunflower seeds while the goldfinches, chickadees, and downy woodpeckers wait impatiently in the nearby spruce trees. A few enter the fray, making daring passes at the feeder—hoping to snatch a seed before the squirrel notices.

I return and shoo him away. The birds rush in. A few minutes later, the squirrel returns, and the whole performance begins again.

We all know our parts.

This little drama unfolds almost every morning unless the rain is pouring down. Then, somehow, we all stay home.

Later, when the feeder has grown quiet, I sit down with my coffee and read my morning Scripture. This morning I am surprised to read:

The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season. You open your hand; you satisfy the desire of every living thing.— Psalm 145:15–16

I immediately thought of “my” gray squirrel.

The squirrel desires sunflower seeds. The finches desire their turn at the feeder. The downy woodpecker waits to fulfill her desire.

And I, for reasons I have never fully understood, desire to feed them. In fact, I delight in feeding them.

I began to see the morning differently: It was not just a charming morning routine, but a picture of provision. Psalm 145 was showing me that God’s care is not only grand and distant, but immediate and near—right here in my backyard.

But the desire of every living thing in my backyard?

There was the squirrel, acting exactly as squirrels do. There were the birds, darting in with astonishing courage between his raids. There I was, carrying sunflower seeds to the feeder before breakfast, still in my slippers.

I was not standing outside the scene, observing it; I was part of it—and that made the psalm feel immediate.

That realization raised another question: how does God satisfy “the desire of every living thing” in scenes like this?

Not by dropping food from heaven into every waiting mouth.

More often, He seems to work through other creatures—including me.

The oak provides acorns for the squirrel. The flower offers nectar to the bee, and the bee unknowingly serves the flower in return. Earthworms nourish the robin. A mother’s body prepares milk for her child before the child is even born. Rain fills the streams. Streams water the roots. Seeds ripen because sunlight and soil have quietly done their work.

And sometimes, one woman fills a bird feeder.

There is a beautiful humility in this. I am not the source of anyone's provision. The seeds are gifts I have received before they become gifts I can give. Before I can feed another creature, I must first receive.

Perhaps this is one of the things the psalmist wanted us to see.

The squirrel, the birds, the seeds, and even my own small part in the morning ritual were no longer separate events. Together they revealed a world in which every creature lives by gifts. God so often opens His hand through the hands, roots, wings, No creature is the source of its own life. Each receives, and many are given the privilege of passing those gifts on to another.

Tomorrow, if the rain holds off, I will carry another scoop of sunflower seeds to the feeder. The squirrel will almost certainly arrive first. The birds will complain from the branches. I will chase him away, and he will come back.

And in that familiar little comedy, the ancient words of Psalm 145 will be quietly lived once again.

Sheila Carroll
Living Books Press

Leave a comment

On a walk I found a single large Queen Anne’s Lace blooming along the road. Back home, I placed it in a jelly jar on the kitchen counter, where the pale afternoon light formed a halo around its broad white crown. It revealed hundreds of tiny blossoms gathered into smaller clusters, each one part of the whole.

When I turned it over, I discovered an intricate cup of delicate green leaves supporting the flower.

I couldn't stop looking at this luminous flower on my kitchen counter.

What had looked like lace from above became something altogether different. Slender green stems spread from a single point. Beneath each cluster was a tiny green star. Long, feathery leaves reached beyond the edge like graceful fingers. Every part seemed to belong exactly where it was.

A few minutes later Jim walked into the kitchen.

“What does this remind you of?” I asked, showing him the white blossom.

He looked only briefly before answering.

“A galaxy of stars.”

He was right. There was something about the way everything radiated from a common center. I found myself wondering whether there was more to this familiar roadside flower than I had ever imagined.

So I did what nature study has taught me to do.

I followed my curiosity.

The first book I reached for was Anna Botsford Comstock's Handbook of Nature Study. Her careful observations introduced me to the names of the flower’s parts—the umbrella-shaped umbel, the finely divided bracts beneath it, the tiny blossoms that together create what appears to be a single flower.

But Comstock also led me to Edith Patch, one of America’s great entomologists, widely known for her work on aphids. She also wrote for children, introducing them to the natural world. In Holiday Meadow, she wrote about flowers and insects as neighbors in a living community. Her chapter on Queen Anne’s Lace, or “Little Daucus,” gave the flower a life.

She began with a young wild carrot, unobtrusively through its first summer. The plant sent its energy into a sturdy taproot, where food was stored for the following year’s growth. Then winter came, and “she rested all winter quietly.” When spring returned, it awakened into its second season, sending up branching stems crowned with broad white umbels whose tiny flower stalks spread “like the ribs of an open umbrella.”

Patch notices everything and helps us see it.

She admired the dark crimson flower that often appears at the center of the umbel. She delighted in one remarkable plant whose crimson blossoms spread across the flower in an entire wedge. She described the graceful leaves that once adorned the hats of ladies at court.

Long after most of us would have walked away, she remained with the flower. The blossoms faded, and green seeds began to form.

The broad flat umbrella slowly folded inward until it resembled a tiny bird’s nest. Later it closed into a tight round cluster that winter winds would carry across Holiday Meadow.

I suddenly recognized something I had seen all my life without ever knowing what it was. Those little brown birds’ nests that tumble through autumn fields were Queen Anne’s Lace in another form.

Now the flower had a biography. It was no longer simply a white blossom blooming beside the road in July. It had a first year and a second year. It rested through winter, fed insects, and sheltered seeds. It changed form with the seasons.

It belonged to the meadow in ways I had never imagined.

I understood the flower in the jelly jar better.

Jim saw a galaxy of stars. Patch saw a life unfolding through the seasons. Comstock revealed the remarkable design hidden beneath its all-too-familiar beauty.

I understood a little better what Charlotte Mason meant about a living education—it is the science of relations. Perhaps the science of relations begins when we stay with one thing long enough to know it well. Curiosity grows into acquaintance, and acquaintance gradually reveals relationships we could never have invented for ourselves.

Every act of looking holds the possibility of seeing more than we saw before. An ordinary roadside flower is no longer merely a flower; it has become a life. A neighbor. A story. A biography.

Perhaps that is one of the greatest gifts of nature study. We can begin by bringing home a single flower in a jelly jar and end by discovering that we have been invited into a world where everything is struck with wonder.

If this essay has inspired a closer look at the world around you, Nature Study Companion: Simple Ways to Explore Wonders Near and Far offers gentle encouragement for continuing the journey.

Sheila Carroll
Living Books Press

Leave a comment

The other morning, I stood in my garden with my grandsons, trying to describe the blossom of a hosta plant to them. Nothing complicated—just the simple act of narrating what was right in front of us. The bloom was a cream color, slender and fluted, but that description still felt generic, as if I were naming a category rather than this particular flower. I wanted to show them how to describe what they see, and the irony was that I couldn’t describe this bloom any better than they could.

Later, I understood why.

I had been looking, not seeing.

The realization unsettled me. Because writ large, this is how we live now: surrounded by wonders we can name but cannot describe, familiar with everything and intimate with almost nothing. We skim. We scroll. We glance. We rarely kneel.

And in that small failure of attention—standing there with a hosta bloom I could not truly see—John White came to mind, along with the deeper question of what it means to see rightly.

In recent years I’ve been seeking out women and men of the past who possessed the vivid, reverent way of seeing the natural world that I’m trying to recover—John Ray, Louis Agassiz, Charlotte Mason. Along that path, I found John White of Roanoke.

White, governor of the Lost Colony, landed with the 1587 expedition that included his son‑in‑law, his daughter, and his infant granddaughter, Virginia Dare—the first English child born in the New World. Commissioned by Queen Elizabeth to document the journey, the artisan-naturalist White painted what he saw with a fidelity that still startles today. His luminous watercolors carry a quality of attention that feels almost impossible now—patient, reverent, exact.

I was deeply affected by those watercolors, made by one of the first English observers to encounter the New World. He is best known for his eloquent, detailed portrayals of the Algonquin people who had lived there for centuries.

But it is his paintings of plants and animals that interest me most. One painting in particular stays with me: his loggerhead turtle. If you expand the image above, the creature grows more itself the closer you look. And if you linger there—just for a moment—you can almost imagine the scene in which White first saw it.

Somewhere along the Carolina coast in the summer of 1585, he crouched near the edge of a tidal creek where the water runs warm and green. The air is thick with salt and pine resin. A loggerhead turtle hauled itself onto the sand, its great domed shell catching the late light like a burnished shield.

White waited and then simply knelt.

His sketchbook is open and ready. The paper is handmade, rough to the touch, easy to brush with watercolors from the small tins beside him. He wets the tip of his brush, touches it to the page, and begins.

The turtle is nearly three feet long and close to four hundred pounds, moving with the slow, deliberate heaviness of a creature shaped more by water than by land. White studies the angle of its neck, the way the skin folds like creased leather, the steady reach of its flippers. He notices the pattern of the scutes on the shell—each one slightly different, like the facets of a stone. He sees how the flippers press into the sand, leaving impressions that will be gone by morning.

He paints the turtle patiently, reflecting on its remarkable fitness for a life lived mostly in the sea, yet capable of coming ashore when it must. White is listening with his eyes.

There is no allegory here, no emblem, no moral lesson. The turtle isn’t “like” anything else; it is wholly itself. A creature offered itself to White’s attention, asking only to be seen.

Behind him, the surf breaks in its long, unending rhythm.
Before him, the turtle breathes.

And in that moment—this is the part I feel more than I really know—White is not thinking of England or the colony or the future. He is simply present. A man attending to a creature he has never seen before, trying to understand it with the only tools he has: patience, pigment, and the conviction that the world is worth noticing.

When he finishes, he sits back on his heels.
The turtle lumbers toward the water.
White watches until it disappears.

He closes his sketchbook.
He has captured something that will outlive him.

We live in a world as different from White’s as water is from sand—yet we are made of the same materials. The same creatures, the same light, the same rhythms of tide and season. There is a tangible kinship between us if we choose to see it.

White’s world was slower, but not simpler.
Our world is faster, but not richer.

What he had—and what I want—is a way of seeing that is not hurried, not possessive, not distracted.

Nature journaling is one way to become like White. A nature table that holds a child’s attention. Or, a book of nature poems, each poem full of sound and beauty.

Another way is simply to write your description in a notebook, as White’s companion Thomas Harriot did.

These are not artistic skills so much as human ones. They are qualities of attention and presence. They are ways of inhabiting the world.

White’s loggerhead turtle is not just a watercolor painting or a generic illustration. That turtle is the turtle that John White saw.

His painting was not just the fulfillment of a directive but an act of tender reverence.

I went back to the hosta.

…and looked again—longer this time, slower. I traced the curve of the petals with my eyes. I noticed the faint striping, the way the bloom flares at the tip like a tiny trumpet, and how the light pools inside the flower, a small, secret brightness. Only then did the inner architecture come into focus: the single pistil reaching forward like a pale thread, and around it the stamens, each tipped with an anther that—on these older blossoms—had darkened into tiny black flecks. They clung to the ends of the white filaments like minuscule seeds, the spent pollen sacs of a flower whose brief invitation to pollinators had already passed.

I realized then that the problem had never been the hosta. It was my attention.

Now the words came—not perfect, but true—I was seeing, truly seeing.

John White kneeling before a turtle;
A grandmother kneeling in her garden.

The posture is the same.

Both of us are trying to see the world as it is. I feel a kinship across the centuries—something in his way of seeing the world that meets my own longing to see more truly.
both of us learning to be patient, humble, curious, reverent,

Both of us are encountering something precious.

I would enjoy John White’s company—once again, there is something in his way of seeing the world that meets my own longing to see more truly.

Sheila Carroll
Living Books Press

Leave a comment

Last week I traveled to Lake Koronis, Minnesota, for the Living Education Retreat, where I had been invited to speak on several topics, including The Peace of Wild Things: Why We Still Need Nature Study.

Lake Koronis is one of those places that seems alive with voices. Loons called across the deep water. Canada geese crossed the sky. Bald eagles drifted overhead. Songbirds filled the trees surrounding the camp.

Yet the greatest gift of the week came from one of our most familiar birds.

The barn swallow.

After carrying my luggage into my room at the Sunrise Inn, I stepped onto the path leading to the meeting hall. Suddenly, a barn swallow swept in front of me.

Not past me. Toward me.

Again and again it crossed my path, looping back in a graceful figure eight, diving and climbing with astonishing speed and joy. I stopped to watch. At first I wondered if there was a nest nearby and I had wandered too close. There wasn’t. The bird had no apparent reason to remain where it was.

Yet it did.

For a few moments, I had the unmistakable feeling that I was being welcomed.

Perhaps that sounds sentimental. I understand the hesitation. We rightly resist projecting our own emotions onto animals.

And yet something equally dangerous has happened in our own age.

We have forgotten that creation speaks.

I had come to Camp Koronis to speak about recovering our vision of an ordered creation—a world radiant with meaning because it bears the fingerprints of its Creator. I wondered beforehand how such a message would be received.

Then came the barn swallow.

Not as an omen or a private revelation, but as a living witness to the very reality I had come to describe.

Its joyful flight and my words belonged to the same story.

The swallow was simply doing what barn swallows have always done, displaying the exuberant freedom with which they were created. The change was not in the bird. The change, for one brief moment, was in me. I had become attentive enough to receive its testimony.

Barn swallows carry a rich symbolism in human imagination. Their return each spring has made them enduring emblems of hope after winter, of homecoming through their faithful return to the same nesting places year after year, and of joy and freedom expressed in their effortless, exuberant flight. Above all, they have become birds of welcome, their arrival announcing that the long season of barrenness has ended and that life has returned once again.

I found myself wondering whether every soul, at some point, waits for its own welcome swallow. This feeling lingered throughout the week.

So, I came to the question:

Can creation speak?

Not with human words, of course. But can the creatures around us communicate something true? Can they bear witness to the One who made them?

Scripture answers with remarkable confidence:

“But ask the beasts, and they will teach you;
the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you;
or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you;
and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
Who among all these does not know
that the hand of the Lord has done this?”
—Job 12:7–10

The birds speak by being fully themselves. In doing so, they proclaim the wisdom, beauty, order, and generosity of God—to those with eyes to see.

That morning, the barn swallow became my teacher.

Not because it revealed something I had never known, but because it awakened something I had forgotten.

The world is not empty of meaning. It is filled with it. Every creature lives within a vast order that reaches beyond itself. The barn swallow did what it had done every summer since the world was young—flew with astonishing grace through the morning air. For a brief moment, I simply saw it.

Charlotte Mason taught that education does not add meaning to the world; it prepares us to perceive the meaning that is already there.

The barn swallow has long since flown on. Yet its greeting remains with me, a reminder that creation has never ceased its quiet testimony. The birds still tell their story. The question is whether we have recovered the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

As Henry David Thoreau once prayed…

Give me the eyes to see the richness already present in the world.
—from The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau

Sheila Carroll
Living Books Press

Leave a comment

Most mornings, before I begin the day, I carry a cup of coffee out to my little raised-bed garden. It isn’t large—a handful of cedar boxes tucked beside our home, overflowing this time of year with tomatoes, beans, cabbage, herbs, marigolds, and whatever else has decided to flourish. Some mornings I pull a few weeds or harvest lettuce for dinner. More often, I simply stand quietly, noticing what has changed since yesterday.

There is always something new to discover. A tomato has begun to blush. The beans have climbed another inch. A swallowtail butterfly has found the zinnias. The bees are already busy among the blossoms. Somehow, without fanfare and without any help from me, life has continued through the night.

I often think these few moments are among the happiest of my day. Certainly, I enjoy growing fresh vegetables, but that isn’t why I return morning after morning. My garden gives me something much deeper than tomatoes or basil. It gives me perspective. In a world that often feels hurried, fractured, and uncertain, the garden reminds me that life is not held together by my efforts alone. There is an order here that I did not create.

Recently I found words for what I have long felt. They came, unexpectedly, not from a gardening book, but from one of Sally Wright’s Ben Reese mysteries.

Ian Pilcher is a man who has known profound sorrow. His family has been marked by war, loss, and heartbreak. Grief and bitterness have become the atmosphere in which he lives. Yet when Ben Reese meets him...Pilcher doesn’t speak of bitterness or sadness. He simply explains, “I console myself with my garden. There I find solace in something deeper and older and more profound than any aspect of my own pedestrian existence.”

When Reese admits he doesn’t understand, Pilcher explains: “There I see the wheels within the wheels... the Omniscient Mind, if you will, and the order of the universe.” And then he reveals the foundation of his peace: “When I see this, I know we haven’t been abandoned.”

At first, that seemed an extraordinary claim. But the more I reflected on it, I realized that perhaps this is what a garden has always been. The mountains reveal God's majesty, the oceans His power, and the stars His infinity. We stand before them in awe, but they can also overwhelm us.

A garden is different.

A garden is the vast order of creation translated into a language the human heart can understand.

In the opening of a flower, the ripening of a tomato, the patient work of a bee, or the mystery of a seed becoming a harvest, we encounter the same wisdom that governs galaxies—but on a scale we can enter, tend, and love.

Is that why Scripture begins in a garden? Before there were kingdoms to govern or cities to build, Adam was placed with Eve in a garden "to work it and keep it."

Humanity's first vocation was not to conquer creation but to cultivate it—not as owners, but as stewards. It was there that men and women first learned the rhythms of creation: dependence and abundance, work and rest, sowing and harvest. The garden became the meeting place between God's creation and human stewardship.

The medieval monks never lost sight of this. Their gardens were never merely places to grow food. They were living reminders of Eden, where beauty and usefulness belonged together, where vegetables grew beside roses and medicinal herbs, and where every season testified to the faithfulness of the Creator. The carefully ordered beds reflected their conviction that creation itself was ordered, meaningful, and given. Gardening was as much an act of contemplation as cultivation.

I wonder if that is why so many of us are drawn to gardens today, even if ours are no more than a few raised beds in the backyard. We think we are growing tomatoes or beans.

But perhaps something else is growing as well.

Patience. Gratitude. Wonder. We begin to notice that we are participants in a living order that existed long before us and will continue long after we are gone.

This is the consolation of a garden.

It does not promise a life free from sorrow. Ian Pilcher knew better than that, and so did the monks who tended their cloister gardens through centuries marked by plague, famine, and war. Instead, the garden offers a quieter assurance. Beneath the changing seasons, beneath our disappointments and fears, the Creator continues to sustain His world. The bees still find the flowers. Seeds still become harvest. Spring still follows winter.

Each morning, coffee cup in hand, I wander out to my little garden once again. I notice what changed while I slept, pull a weed, pick a tomato, listen to the bees, and remember what Ian Pilcher discovered long ago.

We have not been abandoned.

That is why a garden is never just a garden.

Sheila Carroll
Living Books Press

Further Listening

This essay touches on many of the themes we discussed recently on The New Mason Jar podcast with Cindy Rollins.

If you’d like to explore these ideas further, I’d be delighted if you listened in.

The Primacy of Nature Study with Sheila Carroll

Leave a comment

My first encounter with a white mulberry tree was not with a magnificent, ancient companion tree like the one above.

My mulberry tree stood at the far end of a long, low concrete building, its trunk leaning over the dark boughs of a blue spruce. The tree had clearly struggled for years.

One side reached outward to capture the sunlight while the other disappeared into the evergreen’s shadow. It was not as graceful as we expected trees to be. It bore the marks of persistence more than grace.

And somehow, it was beautiful.

Here was a tree that had spent decades growing around an obstacle. Its loveliness lay not in its perseverance, but in the way its form had become the history of its life—a story written in wood.

I approached the tree, wondering. What are you?

The leaves were new to me, not ovals or sharply lobed like an oak or maple, but deeply rounded lobes—almost like tiny mittens.

I opened the plant app on my phone. It was a mulberry tree—a white mulberry tree. I took pictures of the plant and went back to wait in my car.

The tree stayed with me.

Every backyard naturalist knows this feeling. Every now and then, an ordinary plant or creature quietly insists on your attention. It finds you.

When I returned home, I began reading about Morus alba, the white mulberry.

What I learned staggered me.

This humble tree, growing in a forgotten corner of a parking lot, belongs to an ancient lineage whose story stretches back to the beginnings of civilization. It appears alongside Chinese emperors, Marco Polo, and the Silk Road. It has been prized for its leaves, bark, fruit, and roots. It has nourished silkworms, clothed kingdoms, and shaped the course of history.

The deeper I looked, the more the tree resisted being called ordinary.

The historian and naturalist Pliny the Elder saw something special in this tree and wrote nearly two thousand years ago.

He called the mulberry sapientissimus arborum—the wisest of trees. Unlike other fruit trees, it is not deceived by the first warm days of spring. It seems to know when true leaf-time has come, unfolding only after the danger of frost has passed.

This is not simply a patient tree. It is a tree that knows when to grow.

Perhaps that is why I kept returning to the image of the tree in the parking lot.

As I continued reading, another story emerged—one so ancient that it seemed more a legend than a work of history.

For more than five thousand years, the white mulberry has stood beside humanity. Ancient China cultivated it long before the pyramids were built. Generation after generation tended its leaves with extraordinary care.

Not for the tree itself, but for the small caterpillars that depended upon it.

The silkworm asks for nothing except mulberry leaves. In return, it spins one of nature’s most astonishing gifts—a single filament of silk, finer than a human hair, yet stronger than steel, drawn from a cocoon so perfectly that for centuries it was considered almost magical.

An old Chinese tradition tells of an empress seated beneath a mulberry tree, sipping tea, when a cocoon dropped into her cup. As the hot water softened it, she drew out a gleaming thread that seemed never to end.

Whether history or legend, the story points toward something true.

From the quiet partnership of an unassuming tree and a humble caterpillar came silk.

From silk came trade.

From trade came roads stretching thousands of miles across mountains and deserts.

Ideas, inventions, religions, music, art, and stories traveled those same roads, changing civilizations forever.

All because someone paused long enough to recognize a relationship between a white mulberry tree and a caterpillar.

The mulberry has stood quietly beside humanity for more than 5,000 years. It has fed us, clothed us, healed us, sheltered birds, nourished silkworms, inspired legends, and connected civilizations.

Standing beside that mulberry tree, I realized that its story was not only historical but theological. It pointed me toward the question of how creation itself speaks.

Perhaps every created thing has a vocation—a calling to a certain kind of being, its own particular way of participating in the order of creation. The white mulberry becomes itself. And, in doing so, it has fed birds and children, nourished silkworms, clothed civilizations, and altered the course of history.

Wisdom begins not by learning the names of things, but by noticing them long enough to perceive the order written into their very being.

In learning the vocation of the white mulberry, I found myself asking about my own calling and what it might be.

Thank you for joining me on my nature explorations in backyards, alleyways and parking lots.backyards, alleyways and parking lots.

Sheila Carroll
Living Books Press

Leave a comment

When I was little, the sound of crickets chirruping rhythmically on a dusky summer evening renewed me—especially after a recent rain. The sound the crickets made tolled the hour telling me that summer was still alive.

At first glance, crickets seem an unlikely candidate for nature study. Children delight in butterflies and hummingbirds. Adults stop to admire a deer crossing a meadow. Even dragonflies earn our affection with their jeweled wings and remarkable flight.

But crickets?

Many of us spend our lives trying to keep them out of our houses. When a cricket appears in the basement, we rarely pause to admire it. We reach for a broom.

Yet perhaps that is precisely why the cricket has something important to teach us.

One of the great losses of modern life is not simply that we know less about nature. It is that we have forgotten its central lesson: how to see. We increasingly view the natural world through categories of usefulness, convenience, and personal preference. We like some creatures. We tolerate others. We exterminate the rest.

But creation does not arrange itself according to our preferences. We would be wise to learn from the natural world.

For when we learn to see things as they are rather than merely as we wish them to be, we begin to recover a sacramental vision of creation.

A sacramental vision of nature begins when we recognize that every created thing possesses a goodness that does not depend on whether it pleases us.

This does not mean every creature belongs in our kitchen.

It does mean that every creature bears witness to something beyond itself. The world is not merely a collection of objects. It is a creation filled with meaning. Each creature, in its own way, reveals something of the wisdom, beauty, order, and generosity of its Creator.

The cricket is a wonderful teacher because its goodness is not immediately obvious.

Its colors are plain. Its shape is unremarkable. It does not soar like an eagle or flash brilliant colors like a butterfly. Most of its life is spent hidden beneath leaves, stones, and grasses.

And yet every summer evening, the cricket sings.

Hidden within the cricket’s wings is a musical instrument fashioned not by human hands but woven into the creature itself. Crickets produce their song through a process called stridulation. One wing bears a series of tiny ridges, like the teeth of a comb, while the other acts as a scraper. By rubbing the scraper across the ridges, the cricket creates its familiar chirping sound—almost like a violin. The rhythm and pitch vary by species, creating distinct songs throughout the cricket world.

The cricket’s song tells us that music is woven into creation itself. The cricket chirps according to its nature, the thrush sings according to its nature, and human beings compose according to theirs. Each participates in a world that is ordered, rhythmic, and alive with meaning. What Charlotte Mason called the fitness of all things.

As daylight fades and shadows lengthen, the crickets begin their chorus. We often think that crickets chirp louder at night. It is not merely that crickets chirp more loudly at night. The nighttime world itself helps us hear them. Cooler, more humid evening air carries sound farther, while the quiet of dusk allows their song to stand out.

Yet, few of us see a cricket, let alone hear it.

We live in an age that values visibility. We are encouraged to build audiences, cultivate platforms, and seek recognition. Yet the cricket reminds us that much of creation glorifies God without ever being noticed.

The cricket sings because singing is what a cricket was made to do.

Psalm 148 invites us into this vision:

“Praise the Lord from the earth ... beasts and all livestock, creeping things and flying birds.”

The psalmist imagines all creation participating in praise. Not merely human beings, but every creature according to its nature. The cricket’s song becomes part of that great chorus.

Perhaps this is why the poets have loved crickets.

John Keats, wrote in his well-known poem On the Grasshopper and Cricket, “The poetry of earth is never dead.” For Keats, the songs of insects revealed a world that never ceased speaking. Summer gives way to winter, one voice falls silent, another takes up the melody, but the poetry continues. (Enjoy the poem with your children)

The earth is always singing. The cricket helps us know that.

The same lesson appears when we look closer at the cricket itself.

From a distance, a house cricket seems plain and unremarkable. Yet under magnification, another world emerges. Delicate wing veins form intricate geometric patterns. The shield behind the head bears markings that resemble the work of a careful artist—dark bands, crescents, and brushstrokes arranged with surprising elegance.

The longer one looks, the harder it becomes to describe the cricket as ordinary.

No two crickets are exactly alike. Each bears its own subtle variations and individual history, yet every cricket remains recognizably part of a larger whole. We find the same pattern throughout creation. Individuality and community are not opposites. Every creature possesses its own particularity while belonging to a greater order that gives it meaning.

This way of seeing does not happen automatically. It must be cultivated.

The first step is attention.

Instead of asking, “What use is it?” we ask, “What is it?”

The second step is wonder.

Why does this creature even exist? What gifts has it been given? What role does it play in the great community of life?

The third step is gratitude.

What would the world lose if crickets disappeared?

The answer is more than ecological.

We would lose one of the defining sounds of summer evenings. We would lose a voice in the nighttime choir. We would lose the beauty of this creature, which expresses quietly and without fanfare.

And perhaps we would lose an important lesson.

Cricket teaches us that goodness is not limited to what is attractive, useful, or convenient. Goodness is woven throughout creation, even in the creatures we overlook or sweep out the door.

Nature study, at its best, is not the acquisition of facts. It is the recovery of sight. It teaches us to look long enough and carefully enough that the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

A cricket hidden in the grass may never become as beloved as a butterfly. But it may become something even more valuable.

It may help us to see the delicate artistry and sweet song beneath our feet.

Do you have a cricket memory? A grasshopper story? Share it below so we can all learn to look more closely.

Sheila Carroll
Living Books Press

Leave a comment

This week, I spent time with two remarkable women.

Neither one appears on television or leads an international movement.

After getting to know them, I found myself thinking this may be how the world is made whole—not through grand gestures, but through faithful care of what is around us.

Let me explain.

Jim and I had traveled to Lake Michigan to visit some of our favorite places and walk the trails at Sleeping Bear Dune. During a stop at a coffee shop, I noticed a poster about a nonprofit that encourages the use of native plants in home landscapes. Curious, I followed the thread and eventually found myself visiting the organization’s director, Cheryl Gross, at her home near Traverse City.

Cheryl’s yard, about a half acre front and back, is a wonder of native trees, flowers, grasses, shrubs, and ground cover—far too many to name. Over the past twelve years she has transformed the property into a sanctuary for native species, creating habitat for butterflies, birds and insects.

When I asked her why she did it, she spoke with real passion:

“We must do this—for the earth.”

Every garden bed testified to that conviction. Everywhere I looked were signs of patient care: flowers chosen for pollinators, shrubs planted for birds, native grasses restoring habitat, and countless small decisions made over many seasons. The yard had been shaped by years of observation, learning, mistakes, and perseverance.

Her yard seemed to embody a truth that is easily forgotten. The earth is rarely healed through dramatic acts. More often it is healed through thousands of small acts repeated faithfully over time.

As I drove home, I found myself thinking about Cheryl’s twelve years of labor. One plant at a time. One season at a time.

Then I thought about another woman whose work follows a similar pattern.

Readers may remember the little raccoon kit that appeared in our yard a few weeks ago and my struggle to find a way to care for it. That experience introduced me to a world most of us rarely see: wildlife rehabilitation.

Tina, director of MT Nest Farm, lives in that world every day. At this very moment she is feeding, warming, cleaning, and tending more than forty orphaned baby raccoons. Forty tiny creatures requiring formula, medicine, clean bedding, warmth, and endless patience.

Most of us will never witness the work that goes into keeping such vulnerable lives alive. We see the fox crossing a field at dusk or the raccoon slipping quietly back into the woods. We rarely see the midnight feedings, the careful monitoring, the hours of labor that made that moment possible.

Wildlife rehabilitators are among the unsung caretakers of the natural world. Their work is largely invisible, yet countless creatures owe their lives to such patient devotion.

Like Cheryl's garden, Tina's work is built from countless small acts repeated day after day. Neither is dramatic. Both require attention, patience, and care. Both are ways of tending a field entrusted to one's keeping.

Neither woman seemed burdened by the impossible task of fixing everything.

Instead, they were devoted to caring for what had been placed within their reach—and it gave them great pleasure to do so.

Watching Cheryl and Tina, I kept returning to a phrase that has stayed with me for years: the fields that we know.

Pope Leo recently quoted it in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), reminding us that the common good is not merely an ideal but a responsibility lived out in daily life.

The phrase comes from Tolkien’s The Return of the King:

It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.

Not every field.

Not every problem.

Not the whole earth.

Only the field entrusted to us.

For Cheryl, that field is a yard of native plants. For Tina, it is a room full of orphaned raccoons.

Neither woman is saving the whole world. Yet both are making the world more whole.

There is deep wisdom in this, especially now when we are confronted daily with problems too large for any one person to solve. The scale of those problems often leaves us discouraged or numb. We begin to feel that nothing we do can possibly matter.

Tolkien shows us what’s possible: Tend the field you are given.

Everyone talks about saving the planet. Cheryl is planting sedge grass and native flowers.

Everyone worries about habitat loss. Tina is warming formula at midnight and releasing healthy animals onto a preserve.

Meanwhile, violets bloom quietly at our feet.

Small things often carry more life than we realize.

Perhaps one of the missing pieces of our time is that we increasingly think about the natural world through abstractions: ecosystems, sustainability, conservation, biodiversity. These are important words, but reality rarely presents itself in abstract terms.

Reality comes in the scent of warm earth after rain.

Reality is the astonishing agility of a baby raccoon’s paws wrapped around a bottle of formula.

Reality is violets blooming among clover and dandelions, each contributing in its own way to a commonwealth of life.

That is why nature study is so important.

Nature study helps us recover this reality. It trains us to see the world as it actually is rather than as an idea. We begin by noticing. Then, almost without realizing it, noticing becomes affection, and affection becomes care.

And from such attention something important begins to grow within us. Gratitude. Responsibility. Love.

The world is renewed not by extraordinary people doing extraordinary things, but by ordinary people loving ordinary places with extraordinary faithfulness.

A native garden planted.

A baby raccoon fed.

A patch of violets left to bloom.

And the field closest to us is almost always the one we are meant to tend.

Do you have a story about someone like Cheryl or Tina? Tell us about it below.

Sheila Carroll
Living Books Press

Leave a comment

A few days ago, a baby raccoon appeared in my backyard.

At first, I was not overly concerned. We have a mother raccoon living beneath our deck, and I had seen her only a few nights earlier. She was unusually light-furred, and I assumed the little wanderer had strayed too far from the den.

I placed the kit near what I believed was the den entrance and waited.

Surely his mother would come.

That simple assumption began an unexpected education.

As the days passed, the little raccoon wandered farther and farther from the deck. One evening, he crossed the entire lawn and ended up near a neighbor’s outdoor grill, perhaps seeking warmth.

The little wanderer seemed determined to find his own way in the world.
Here’s a video I took of him.

Meanwhile, I began making phone calls.

“Call a wildlife rehabilitator,” everyone says.

That sounds simple until you discover that many rehabilitators are overwhelmed. Some accept only certain species. Others are already caring for dozens of orphaned animals. In Michigan, regulations may prohibit transporting certain wildlife beyond one’s county or neighboring counties. What appears to be a straightforward solution quickly becomes more complicated.

I also discovered how much conflicting information exists about raccoons.

They are abundant. They are clever. They are often considered nuisances.

And yet this little animal was not a nuisance. He was simply a baby.

The experience reminded me how little most of us know about the hidden lives unfolding around us every spring.

This is the season when raccoons, rabbits, foxes, opossums, songbirds, ducks, and countless other creatures are bearing and raising young. Beneath decks, inside hollow trees, under shrubs, in grass, and high in branches, mothers are feeding, guarding, and teaching their offspring.

Most of the time, we never notice.

Nature study often begins with noticing, and noticing eventually leads to wonder and then to reverence for all life.

I began to ask myself—

How does a mother raccoon keep track of several wandering kits in the darkness?

How many nighttime journeys has she already made carrying them one by one to safety?

How many dangers must she navigate that we never see?

Perhaps that is why this little raccoon has occupied my thoughts more than I expected. He has become a doorway into a larger reality.

The natural world is not merely a collection of species. It is a community of lives, each following its own pattern and purpose.

Earlier this spring, I wrote about Mabel, a mallard duck who nested under my study window. Her story ended sadly when a crow destroyed her eggs. You can read that story here: Make Way for Ducklings.

Perhaps that is why this little raccoon has occupied my thoughts so deeply. When we begin paying attention to the creatures around us, we do not encounter only beauty and delight. We also encounter uncertainty, loss, and responsibility. Nature study is not sentimental. It invites us to see things as they are.

As I write, I still do not know how this story will end.

The mother has not returned, though part of me still hopes she is nearby. The little raccoon is warm, fed, and vocal. Tomorrow I will make more phone calls and continue searching for someone qualified to care for him.

For now, I find myself thinking not only about one lost raccoon, but about the countless mothers quietly raising young all around us at this very moment.

Most will never be seen.

Yet they are there, carrying on the ancient work of nurturing life.

And that is something worth noticing.

Have you ever found a young creature in need of help?

Perhaps it was a fledgling, a rabbit, a duckling, a squirrel, or some other small wanderer that crossed your path.

Tell us your story in the comments. What happened? What did you learn? Your experience may help someone else facing the same situation.

With thanks,

Sheila Carroll
Living Books Press

P.S. We’ve given Living Books Press a fresh new look. Come visit the new site, explore it, and tell me what you think. If you’d like a little encouragement in your inbox each week, be sure to subscribe to Morning Basket.

Leave a comment

Last Sunday, as the church rose and sang the beloved hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” I listened more closely to the words I have known since childhood.

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.

The words are so familiar that they can easily slip by on the swinging tune. Yet as we sang, I wondered why this hymn endures. Hundreds of Victorian hymns faded from memory. Still, this one is sung by children and grandparents alike.

Why does this song still echo in our hearts?

The answer, I think, begins with the woman who wrote them.

Cecil Frances Alexander was born in Ireland in 1818 and began writing poetry as a child. She eventually wrote more than four hundred hymns, including the beloved Christmas hymn Once in Royal David’s City.

Yet she was not simply a hymn writer, like Fanny Crosby. Throughout her life, she was deeply involved in caring for the poor and for children with physical handicaps. Her widely successful hymns brought in substantial royalties, which she dedicated to establishing a school for deaf or mute children, significantly improving their access to education and care.

That detail stopped me.

She spent her life helping children who could not hear birdsong or speak of what they saw, giving them access to language and expression. Yet she wrote one of the most enduring hymns about creation. That struck me as remarkable.

I began to look further.

The more I learned about her, the more my respect grew. All Things Bright and Beautiful was never intended to be a pleasant song for children. Alexander teaching children to understand the Nicene Creed.

What is remarkable is how she did it. She skipped catechism questions and explanations, instead pointed to the world around: every little flower, every singing bird, the purple-headed mountain, the river running by, the bright sky at sunrise and sunset, garden fruits, and the changing seasons. She believed these familiar things could carry truths larger than themselves.

That teaching method may feel old-fashioned now, but it rests on a deep truth about learning. We understand through images before we grasp abstractions. A child who loves a bird is ready to learn about creation. A child who marvels at a flower has taken a first step toward wonder.

The hymn follows a beautiful progression. First, we observe. We notice the flower and the bird. Next, delight. We enjoy their colors, songs, and beauty. Finally, recognition. We understand these things belong to a larger order and story.

Observation.

Delight.

Meaning.

That movement lies at the heart of the hymn, but it is also the heart of the older nature-study tradition.

Before nature study became a school subject, many believed that creation was one of God’s great teachers. Paying attention to the natural world was more than a scientific exercise. It was a way to build gratitude, humility, affection, and reverence. A flower was never just a flower. A bird was never just a bird. Both belonged to a world that was ordered, meaningful, and full of beauty.

That vision quietly shaped many of the writers we still cherish today.

We find it again in the stories of James Herriot, where a kitten, a sheep, or a farm dog often becomes the doorway to larger truths about kindness, gratitude, and love.

Today, we live in a time when most people encounter nature primarily through screens, documentaries, or data. Yet the invitation offered by Alexander remains surprisingly fresh.

Go outside.

Step into the backyard on a summer morning and linger a few moments. Watch the goldfinch flash yellow as it visits the feeder. Notice the rabbit resting beneath the lilac, nearly hidden by shadows. Look at the dandelion opening its bright face to the sun. Listen for the chickadee calling from the maple overhead. None of these sights is striking on its own. Together, they form the everyday wonder Cecil Frances Alexander understood so well. The world constantly offers such moments to anyone willing to notice.

These are ordinary experiences . Yet they are the very experiences from which wonder grows.

When I think about All Things Bright and Beautiful now, I hear it differently. What once seemed a simple hymn now reminds me of an older way of seeing. It invites us to recover a habit of attention and to rediscover that the world around us is neither accidental nor empty.

The hymn starts with a flower and a bird, but ends elsewhere. It leads us to see creation as a gift, beauty as a revelation, and the everyday world as worthy of our notice.

Perhaps that is why the hymn still lives.

It teaches us to look again.

The backyard becomes more than a backyard. The familiar world shines with new meaning. Here, we stand as generations did before us—among creatures great and small, grateful for every one of them.

A Note of Thanks

To those who support Nature Study Notes as paid subscribers, thank you.

Your support allows me to continue researching and writing about the natural world and to share this older vision of creation as ordered, beautiful, meaningful, and worthy of our attention.

Paid subscribers also receive access to the growing Nature Study Archive, including guides, lessons, printables, and other resources designed to help families explore the wonders of the natural world.

If you would like to join us, you can learn more about becoming a paid subscriber below.

Sheila Carroll
Living Books Press

Leave a comment

For more than forty years I kept bees, until the fifty-pound hive bodies became too heavy to lift.

Being a beekeeper meant entering into a conversation with these remarkably intelligent creatures. Learning the vibrations of their hum, the whirr of wings, and the different tones within the hive told you when they were content, distressed, preparing to swarm, or restless in winter when I would prop the cover slightly to allow them their quiet winter flight.

Keeping them healthy and thriving was both a joy and a challenge. The years my bees flourished, I felt we had done it together. The years they languished, I felt responsible. The bees taught me to listen, to observe carefully, and to learn their ways.

I first met the bees as a young woman while studying at Emerson College in East Sussex, England. John Wilkes, a teacher and creator of the Flowforms—sculptural vessels designed to aerate and enliven water through rhythmic movement—was also a beekeeper. One spring day he invited me to help with what he called “spring cleaning” in the bee yard.

I remember almost everything about that day.

It was early spring and, surprisingly for the English countryside, the sun shone. There was the smell of damp earth, weathered hives, beeswax, and smoke. The wooden hives stood in rows beneath the soft Sussex light while bees moved steadily in and out of the entrances with purposeful calm. I remember feeling slightly afraid and deeply drawn in at the same time.

John moved among the hives quietly and attentively, as though entering into conversation rather than managing livestock. I did not yet realize how much that mattered.

While I scraped propolis and old beeswax from the hive frames with a bee tool, John told the story of the nuptial flight of the virgin queen bee.

I have carried that story within me for more than fifty years.

“The hive knows when a new queen is needed,” he said. “A single female larva is chosen and fed royal jelly until she becomes the future matriarch of the colony.”

Then he described the flight itself.

“When the queen is ready, and the day is warm and filled with sunlight, she leaves the hive and rises upward into the summer air. She will mate only once in her lifetime. The drones follow her in widening spirals higher and higher into the light. Only the strongest will reach her.”

As he spoke, I could see it:
the queen ascending,
the drones circling upward beneath the open sky,
the great spiral of life unfolding above the fields.

“There,” he said quietly, “high in the warm air, the future of the hive is sealed.”

The queen returns carrying within her the future of the colony. The drones fall back toward the earth, their task completed. The queen enters the darkness of the hive again and remains there, laying as many as two thousand eggs a day for the rest of her life.

“What happened to the drones?” I asked.

“They die soon afterward,” he said gently.

I remember feeling saddened.

Then he looked directly at me and said something I have never forgotten:

“Don’t mourn for the bees that die, whether workers or drones. The real being is the hive itself, not the individual bee.”

I remember standing utterly still as he spoke, as if standing before a mystery.

Over time I began to understand that bees reveal something profound about the nature of creation itself. Nothing in the hive exists alone. Bees and blossoms, weather and water, soil and season, meadow and orchard all belong to one another. Human beings do too, whether we remember it or not.

The old beekeepers understood this instinctively. The flourishing of the hive depended upon the flourishing of the land itself. And human beings flourished best when they lived not as conquerors of creation, but as participants within a larger commonwealth of life.

Perhaps this is why the loss of bees feels so painful to so many people. Their disappearance touches something older than economics or agriculture. It awakens the fear that we ourselves have forgotten how to live in right relationship with the living world.

And perhaps that is what I have really been trying to recover in these essays all along:
an older vision of creation as alive with relationship, meaning, and presence.

The bees knew this long before we did.

These essays are part of a larger effort to recover an older vision of creation as alive with relationship, meaning, beauty, and presence.

If you would like to support this work and receive access to the Nature Study Archives, guides, and seasonal resources, you can become a paid subscriber below.

Sheila Carroll
Living Books Press

Leave a comment

A few days ago, I spent time with hundreds of homeschooling mothers at the INCH convention in Lansing. I spoke on nature study, moral imagination, and the older vision of education that has shaped so much of my own work these past years.

What moved me most was not simply that the rooms were full or that the talks were well received. It was the feeling underneath so many conversations afterward.

Again and again, mothers spoke with a kind of longing.

Not primarily for better curriculum or more efficient systems, though those things have their place. What I sensed was something deeper: a mourning for something difficult to name. A feeling that modern life has become hurried, fragmented, overlit, overstimulated. That children are growing up surrounded by information while somehow losing contact with reality itself.

Many parents feel this instinctively now.

They see children spending more time indoors than outdoors. More time with representations of nature than with nature itself. More familiarity with screens than with birdsong, weather, trees, insects, clouds, or the slow unfolding of seasons.

And perhaps adults feel it too.

We move quickly from task to task while something inward grows thin and tired. Attention becomes scattered. Silence feels uncomfortable. The world itself can begin to feel flat—less alive, less meaningful, less full of presence.

It was into this atmosphere that I opened my workshop with Wendell Berry’s well-loved lines from The Peace of Wild Things:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be…

Those words landed deeply in the room.

Because many parents today do carry this quiet fear for their children. Not only fear of danger or instability, but fear that something essential is slipping away from human life itself.

And this is why I believe nature study matters more now than ever before.

Not as an educational accessory.
Not merely as preparation for science.
Not as one more homeschool subject.

Nature study is, at heart, a recovery of relationship.

Charlotte Mason understood this clearly when she wrote, “We were all meant to be naturalists, each in his degree.” She did not mean that every child must become a scientist. She meant that every child should grow up in living relationship with the created world.

Nature study forms powers that modern life steadily weakens:
attention, patience, observation, affection, humility, delight.

It teaches children to notice.

To remain present long enough for the world to reveal itself.

To realize that creation is not empty scenery or raw material or background noise for human activity, but a living world filled with meaning, pattern, beauty, and relationship.

Over the past year especially, I have found myself returning again and again to what feels like a lost vision of reality—an older understanding shared by many writers, naturalists, poets, and educators before the modern age fragmented knowledge into disconnected specialties.

They saw the world as an integrated whole that was part of the immense, immeasurable created world.

The world was alive with correspondence, meaning, and order. Rivers resembled trees. Leaf veins mirrored watersheds. Sandhill crane migration, seasons, tides, flowering, and growth belonged to a great woven pattern of relationships. Nature was not merely examined. It was encountered.

And somewhere along the way, much of this way of seeing faded.

We learned to analyze without lingering. To classify without loving. To gather information without developing affection.

Yet children still hunger for the real world. They hunger for connection.

You can see it whenever a child crouches beside an anthill, fills pockets with stones, watches tadpoles in a pond, or follows the movement of clouds with complete absorption. Attention comes naturally to children when something living calls to them.

Nature study protects and deepens this birthright.

In the introduction to The Nature Study Companion: Simple Ways to Explore Wonders Near and Far, I wrote that we are living in an age where glowing screens increasingly replace glowing sunsets, where the hum of electronics drowns out birdsong, and where many children experience what Richard Louv famously called “nature-deficit disorder.”

But nature study is about far more than reducing screen time.

It restores a sense of place.

It helps children feel that they belong to a living world.

One of the simplest things I shared during the workshop was this phrase:

Attention is the goal.

Not perfect journals.
Not organized lessons.
Not mastering facts.

Attention.

A child who notices the first red maple leaves in autumn… the return of chickadees after winter… moss growing brighter after rain… is developing something profoundly important.

Affection grows through attention.

And affection eventually becomes care.

This is how stewardship begins—not through worry for our planet or statistics, but through love.

The good news is that nature study does not require elaborate preparation.

A family can begin almost immediately:
a weekly walk,
tea outdoors,
following one tree through the year,
keeping binoculars near the kitchen window,
watching for firsts and lasts of the seasons,
learning the names of nearby birds,
lingering beside a puddle after rain.

Consistency matters more than complexity.

Nature study grows slowly through repeated acts of attention.

And perhaps that is part of its healing power.

It gently retrains both children and adults to remain present in the world again.

To see.

To delight.

To belong.

Berry’s poem ends this way:

I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief…

I think many people today are searching for precisely this peace, though they may not know its name.

Nature study helps open the door to it.

Not because nature itself is God, but because creation still bears witness to order, beauty, generosity, and gift.

The world is more alive than we have been taught to believe.

And our children need to know it.

Much of my work at Nature Study Notes is devoted to recovering this older vision of the natural world—one rooted in wonder, attention, meaning, and relationship.

If you would like to support this work and receive access to the Nature Study Archives, guides, and seasonal resources, you can become a paid subscriber below.

With a grateful heart,

Sheila Carroll
Living Books Press

Leave a comment

Share Nature Study Notes

Subscribe now

A few weeks ago, once the snow had melted and spring rains arrived, I drove to Deerfield Park and walked along the wooded path to the steel and timber bridge over the Chippewa River. The ground felt soft beneath my feet. Water pooled in the low spots. The black earth and last fall’s brown leaves gave off a rich, full scent.

The path to the bridge showed signs of spring: wild rose bushes with swollen buds, raspberry canes just starting to leaf out, and low grasses pushing up after a long winter.

When I reached the bridge and looked upstream, the river was full, dark, and swollen, rushing with a cold urgency. It wasn’t violent, but it moved with a quiet strength. The current pushed hard against the banks, carrying branches and foam quickly below. I stood there for a long time, listening.

And then, all at once, something became clear to me like a revelation.

These waters were not merely river water or rain gathered from nearby fields. What flowed beneath that bridge originated far beyond this small place. Northern snowfields had thawed. Subarctic Canadian ice had broken into streams. Countless rivulets and unseen waters merged into creeks, rivers, and the great northern currents heading toward Lake Superior. From there, the waters traveled south into Lake Michigan, through inland waterways and tributaries, through marsh, stream, and hidden subterranean paths, until at last, carried by the persistent gravity of creation, they arrived here—at this river, this bridge, this moment, and me.

I stood there in reverent astonishment, thinking:

All waters are one water.

They are not truly separate bodies after all.

Rain this morning may have rested on northern ice. Water cupped in a child’s hand may have drifted centuries earlier in an ocean current or risen unseen through cedar roots. Water circulates continuously through the living world, linking places, uniting, and separating.

River becomes cloud. Cloud becomes snow. Snow becomes a stream. Stream becomes a lake. Lake becomes mist and rain anew.

Nothing remains entirely to itself, yet neither does it cease to be what it is.

Perhaps this is why water moves us so deeply. We sense in it a reflection of our own inner rivers. Its motion, cleansing, surrender, and gathering seem to echo ancient knowledge quietly carried within us.

The still waters still the soul. Running water refreshes us before we understand why.

Children are drawn instinctively to puddles, streams, shorelines, and rain. Adults, too, standing beside rivers or lakes, feel something quietly settle into a peaceful place within them.

Water is never completely still. Even the tranquil lake belongs to a vast, circulating mystery flowing through cloud, stone, root, blood, and sea.

All waters are one water.

The image of living water—of the sea and the stream—is the most perfect material type of the nature of God’s eternal love.
—John Ruskin

Perhaps one way to help children see this is simply to begin noticing where water comes from and where it goes.

Follow the path of rain after a storm. Watch the ditch overflow into the creek and the creek empty into the river. Stand beside spring runoff and imagine the long northern journey of melting snow. Sit quietly beside a lake at evening and remember that the water touching the shore will not remain there. It will rise again into cloud and travel onward across field, forest, and sea.

A child who learns to trace the journey of water begins to see that the world itself is joined together in ways we often forget.

And perhaps we adults need this reminder no less.

For water refuses isolation. It gathers, carries, cleanses, yields, nourishes, and returns again. It moves patiently through the whole living world, binding distant places into one continuous, flowing gift.

The Scriptures tell us…

All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full.
—Ecclesiastes 1:7

Standing on that bridge above the spring river, I felt I understood a little more why.

Thank you for reading and looking out into your world for signs of water moving.

Sheila Carroll
Living Books Press

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

This page gathers the guides and lessons I’ve created to share with you as a thank you for your support of Nature Study Notes.

I will continue to add to it over time as new pieces are written. Watch for emails marked “Paid Subscriber” in the subject line.

These guides and lessons are meant to be used simply, in your home and out of doors Everything here i…

Read more

This spring, our front lawn is bursting with dandelions.

They appeared suddenly. One day, a few yellow heads; next, the yard blazed with dandelions. Violets, too, are among the grass—low and purple, hard to notice unless you bend down.

I left them to grow…

And not without a little hesitation. The lawns near ours are cut short and green, and dandelions are removed. This is how things are usually done in our neighborhood.

I let them grow longer and keep the grass chemical-free—for the bees and other insects. However, I will mow eventually. Waiting helps the natural world—plants, birds, insects, and worms flourish.

In these early spring weeks, not much else blooms. The bees are already out—I see them each day, moving from flower to flower. Wasps and other small flying bugs, too. The dandelions welcome them all. So I wait to mow. When more flowers bloom, then I mow.

It is a small thing to let the dandelions grow, yet this decision reflects a larger perspective about nature and our place in it.

And yet, here is the best part: the yard does not feel neglected. It feels full—busy, even. The yellow is scattered with its own ordered communities. Each flower stands on its stem, lifting just above the grass.

I begin to wonder what makes a dandelion. My first go-to for nature knowledge is not Google but the venerable Handbook of Nature Study by Anna Botsford Comstock (1911 edition). In it, there is a lesson for teachers in which she praises the dandelion for its uncanny ability to reproduce and grow almost anywhere.

The dandelion grows where it lands. In lawns, meadows, roadsides, and cracks in pavement. It sends down a long root, pulling what it needs from deep in the soil. It brings minerals up. It offers its leaves, flowers, and roots for use. It gives color where there was none, and food where little else grows.

It does not seem to wait for ideal conditions.

The bud is small, green, and simple, as if it has nothing to show. Then it opens into a bright yellow circle—but even here, it is not what it first seems. The flower is made up of many small parts, each of which can become a seed.

Comstock tells of finding a large dandelion rosette spreading in her garden, shading everything around it. She pulled it up, intending to reclaim her space, only to find the root so deep and strong beneath the soil it measured a foot long. She ended by apologizing to the plant, realizing, as she put it, that perhaps it was she who had intruded on its ground.

There is more to this plant than meets the eye—its presence challenges us to rethink what belongs and what benefits our landscapes.

Every part of the plant can be used—even the buds. The leaves are rich in vitamins A, C, and K; the roots can be roasted to make a drink like coffee; the flowers have been used in wines and syrups. The milky sap in the stem—often seen as a bother—has been used in old remedies for skin.

Their name has history in its sound. “Dandelion” comes from the French dent de lion—”lion’s tooth”—for the jagged leaves. In older plant books, it was called taraxacum, from a Greek word for “healing” or “remedy.” The milky juice in the stem is called plant latex and was considered during WWII when rubber was scarce.

In medieval Europe, dandelions were grown on purpose, not destroyed. Monastic gardens had them with other herbs for food and medicine. When settlers came to North America, they brought dandelion seeds—not as a weed, but as something they needed.

During hard times, especially in the 1800s and early 1900s, dandelion leaves and roots were readily available and provided people with food. Even today, in many places, they are still respected as wild food.

There is a simple democracy to the dandelion. It grows where it can and allows others to grow there too—through pavement, along roads, in even the smallest yards. It asks for little and gives much.

Most of us first knew the dandelion as children. We gathered dandelions into small bouquets and carried them, proud as could be, to our mothers. A handful of stems, shaggy and bright, offered with full seriousness.

Just last week, my grandsons did the same.

They came in from the yard with their hands full of yellow blooms, calling out for me. The stems were too short, the blossoms ready to close, but it did not matter. It was a gift from them.

The Lesson

Emily Dickinson, who often finds nature a source of inspiration, helps us see the dandelion as part of a much larger unfolding.

The Dandelion’s pallid tube
Astonishes the Grass,
And Winter instantly becomes
An infinite Alas –

The tube uplifts a signal Bud
And then a shouting Flower, -
The Proclamation of the Suns
That sepulture is o’er.

(“That sepulture is o’er” means the grave of winter has given way.)

Dandelion blossoming lasts longer than most flowers. But after their bright yellow blooms comes a remarkable change.

The head closes for a while, almost disappearing. When it opens, it becomes a beautiful, round sphere—light, airy, and well-shaped. The globe looks too fragile for such a strong plant. Yet there it is, each seed joined to its own small parachute, ready to fly.

It is hard not to admire it.

Each seed has what it needs: a body, a thin fiber, and a crown to lift it. Together, they make a sphere; alone, they travel.

There is wisdom in this.

In a world that feels, at times, uncertain and shifting, this dandelion story offers a steady lesson: our environment deserves reconsideration, and even small changes—like letting dandelions grow—can make a difference.

Naturalists like John Ray looked on the living world as ordered and rich with manifold goodness. They held that purpose unfolds, even when the end was not known. That is, the dandelion is part of a much larger beauty and design.

Standing in the yard now, I begin to understand a little of what they meant.

The lawn is still bright with dandelions. The violets are there too. The bees continue their work. And my grandsons, not at all concerned with lawns or neighbors, have gathered another small bouquet for me.

They hand it to me with the same delight each time.

I am grateful for the flowers, for the children, and for the dandelion that has shown me the value in letting the world grow as it will.

What once seemed a weed now teaches me to see abundance, welcome change, and recognize the gifts beneath my feet.

Many blessings as you enjoy spring, wherever you live.

Sheila Carroll
Living Books Press

P. S. If you liked this post about the dandelion, please let us know below. Everyone benefits from your insights.

Leave a comment

Each spring, I feel a twinge as the trees come fully into leaf.

All winter, I watched the traceries etched against the sky. Each branch stood distinct, each with its own. Like rivers and tributaries of wood reaching skyward.

When spring finally arrives and leaves unfurl from impossibly small buds—light-green at first, then deepening to the tree’s own shade—this softness veils the traceries I watched all winter. As the tree becomes full again, its architecture gradually disappears behind a scaffold of green.

This year, I sat longer than usual on the sofa with my coffee. I watched the morning light come up behind the red maple in the yard. I tried to hold in mind the shape I had watched all winter: the branching, the way each limb divided again. Soon, it would be a burnished, deep-red wonder of leaves.

Reflecting on the branching through the morning, I found it called to mind another image: a river seen from above. Rather than the river as it appears at eye level, I imagined it as a network from the air—one channel branching into many, tributaries reaching outward, each smaller stream echoing the larger whole.

This branching pattern also brought to mind the arteries in the human body, which branch from the heart into ever-smaller veins and capillaries. The hidden rivers within us flow through vessels that divide and rejoin, carrying blood to each part.

Tree. River. Veins.

The same pattern, repeated.

It took me a moment to connect these images. The whole recapitulates the parts. Microcosm in macrocosm, as above so below, as within so without—terms found in science, philosophy, spirituality. Occasionally, in older writings, such as those by John Ray, you will see the word self-similar—a pattern in which the part resembles the whole. Not identical, but recognizably akin, an echoing form.

As I researched further, I found that the idea of self-similarity is found in several early naturalists. Yet, the real surprise for me came when I learned that John Ruskin (1819-1900), a well-known writer and lecturer, art historian, and art critic, spoke to art students of what he called the “law of help”—the way natural forms extend and support one another through branching structures. He saw this pattern in trees, certainly, but also in rivers, in clouds, in the very shaping of the land. One part reaching out to assist another, each division not a breaking, but a giving.

He taught that in the living world, nothing stands alone: every element, in a tree, a body, or a patch of earth, relies on others—root and leaf, vein and breath, soil and rain. This quiet, steady support defines life; when it fails, things weaken and collapse. From this, he draws a clear thesis: life is sustained by cooperation, while isolation leads to decay. This interconnected order is both natural and moral—a reflection of deeper goodness, where all things exist in right relationship.

Charlotte Mason admired Ruskin deeply and knew his work well. She understood, as he did, that noticing begins all education. Not to impose ideas, but to receive—to notice form, relation, order.

His greatest service to us is that he has taught us to see. — Charlotte Mason, Home Education

And yet, for all this, the word most of us would now use is not self-similar but a more recent one.

Fractal.

Benoît Mandelbrot introduced the term in the late twentieth century. It derives from the Latin fractus, meaning broken or fractured—not as damage, but as something splitting into parts that resemble the whole.

A fractal is a pattern that repeats at every scale. The smallest segment retains the same characteristics as the largest.

Once you begin to see it, it becomes difficult to look anywhere without finding it.

Rivers branch into tributaries, then smaller streams, each tracing patterns that mirror the watershed. Trees divide into limbs, branches, and twigs, repeating the same form. Leaf veins spread outward. Lightning forks across the sky, resembling roots searching for water underground. Even the bronchi of the lungs unfurl in this pattern, carrying breath deeper into the body.

It is not a trick of resemblance. It is a way the world is made.

Perhaps this is why the word arrives late. The pattern, though never hidden, was always visible, illustrated, described, and woven into life. Naming it as a unifying principle—the same form governing river, tree, and lung—called for a deep and sustained attention, noticing that persists until such correspondence becomes clear.

These patterns are not distant or abstract. They are close at hand.

A walk after rain will reveal them to you. Water pools along the path’s edge, then splits, then splits again, forming miniature rivers that echo larger ones. Split a leaf and follow its veins. Observe a fern as it unfurls—each leaflet mimics the shape of the whole.

Recall we explored this in the fiddle head fern and the Fibonacci Spiral, an architectural marvel. Even beneath our feet, in the quiet work of fungi—the mycorrhizal networks binding root to root—a branching, connecting pattern carries life across the forest floor.

And so I return to the maple tree in my front yard.

The maple’s leaves have fully arrived, winter traceries barely visible. Yet I know something new: the form persists. Branching continues, hidden beneath green abundance, repeating itself in seen and unseen ways.

To stand before the maple is to stand before a pattern that runs through river and root, leaf and lung. This pattern—the quiet unity of repeated form—invites us, if we linger, to notice not only what is there, but that it is given.

The next time you and your children pass beneath a tree, follow the line as it divides and divides again. Let your eye travel from trunk to branch, from branch to twig, from twig to the smallest reach.

You may begin to see it everywhere.

And sometimes, after such seeing, the hand wants to follow.

Not to capture the whole tree—that would be impossible—but to trace the way it grows. A line that becomes two, then many. A small beginning that carries within it the shape of something larger.

There is a simple drawing lesson I came across at Art Projects for Kids that does just this. It begins, not with a finished tree, but with the act of branching—helping a child notice what trees have in common, even when they are not standing before one. It offers a gentle way to let the eye and the hand work together, so that what has been seen in the world begins to take form on the page.

You can download directions here.

Until next week, enjoy spring where ever you live.

Sheila Carroll
Living Books Press

Tell us about spring in your backyard.

Leave a comment