Nature is Never Spent

Last summer, a sunflower fell from a bird's beak at my birdfeeder into a small plastic pot below. It sprouted, and because I love to see what happens with volunteers, I decided to let it grow. So I had an ugly little pot with a scrappy little sunflower plant. I photographed its progress for a couple of months. I posted about it a few times during the year, but I'd never put it all together. Here is the story, in the present tense.

( Cut for quite a few large-ish photos )

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Today, I have fulfilled my commitment to post every day for one year about some observation I have made of nature. It's been a lovely experience: I thought more about things I had previously only noticed in passing, I learned about things I'd never researched before, and most of all I was doing something every day that was focused outside me, on positive things I already loved: life, growth, cycles. I recommend it! It often took a significant amount of time each day, from fifteen minutes to an hour or more, and I think that kept me from spending as much time on some other creative endeavors, but I'm very glad I've done it.

I definitely plan to continue this journal. I'd like to keep a record of annual nature events in my area so I can compare dates and trends from year to year, and it's not like I'm going to stop noticing things that I want to share. I may not post every day, but I expect to be fairly regular.

If you've been watching, I hope it's been a good experience for you, and those of you who have joined in with comments, thank you! I really enjoy talking to you about the fascinating and beautiful things in the world. ♥

Since I'm a weather nerd, it would be easy for me to use this project to just babble about weather. I intend to try to avoid that, mostly. However...

April turned over to May with two nights in a row of extensive severe storms and tornadoes all over the state. It was an exhausting two nights. In the end, the damage and death toll could have been much worse here, but the storm system continued east and later caused the Columbia River to flood Nashville. I'm hoping it's not an indicator of the rest of the spring storm season.

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I have long admired weather and nature diarists from times past. You know, those meticulous dead white dudes who would write down, every day, what the clouds were like in their corner of England, or on which day the first frost occurred in Pennsylvania, or when the robins were sighted for the first time. Not exciting reading at the time, but decades and centuries later, their writings can be mined for climate data and species behavior patterns. So maybe I'm thinking of that a little here, but mostly I think I just want to have a clear, simple task that records the things I notice all the time.