By Clare Walker Leslie
Published at Storey Publishing
About the book
With dozens of simple prompts and exercises, best-selling author, naturalist, and artist Clare Walker Leslie invites you to step outside for just a few minutes a day, reignite your sense of wonder about the natural world, and discover the peace and grounding that come from connecting with nature. Using stunning photography as well as the author’s own original illustrations, The Curious Nature Guide will inspire you to use all of your senses to notice the colors, sounds, smells, and textures of the trees, plants, animals, birds, insects, clouds, and other features that can be seen right outside your home, no matter where you live. Sketch or write about one exceptional nature image each day; learn to identify cloud types and the weather they bring; or create a record of what you see each day as you walk your dog. Easy, enjoyable, and enlightening, these simple exercises will transform your view of the world and your place within it.
My Thoughts
I love nature – exploring the woods or walking in the neighborhood is always a fun activity to do whether alone or with family/friends.
So I was curious about this book. How could it make exploring nature more fun and entertaining. As soon as I grabbed the book and started reading it I was hooked.
The author has beautifully reduced the table of contents to three sections – begin, discover, connect.
Begin – first, you need to pause. Wherever you are, open your senses to the world of nature around you. This section will give you some tips on how to pause and enjoy what is around you whether you are in the woods or in a park in the downtown area. There is always something to enjoy.
Discover – This section will help you identify what trigger your curiosity. Take a closer look at the clouds, the night sky, the plants and animals, rivers, rocks and so on. This weekend I was doing Uber and a young lady requested a ridesharing. At some point she simply said “I love the clouds.” I lifted my eyes and looked at the clouds – they were ok but not the beautiful white puffy ones. Then she proceeded to tell me that she came to Canada from India back in December. In India there is so much pollution that they do not see the clouds. Then it dawned on me…. for us Canadians we probably take the clouds for granted because we see them all the time. I am thankful for her comment because it made me realize that we are blessed to be able to see clouds on a daily basis.
Connect – This section is interesting to me. The author encourages you to journal and meditate on nature. Personally I would prefer just drawing what I see but everyone is different. I would also bring my faith in my drawings and observations of nature. But the author encourage you in developing a new way of connecting with what you have observe – could be drawing, writing a story or a poem, using photography, anything.
Through the pages of this book, the author is slowly expanding your senses and your observation skills in order to help you to be more aware of the nature surrounding you on a daily basis. This would also be a great book to discover as a family, for homeschoolers, or within a class.
The Curious Nature Guide is available for purchase at your favorite bookstore, even on amazon.ca and amazon.com.
Disclaimer: Thanks to Thomas Allen for sending me the above mentioned book for review purposes. I was not monetarily compensated for this review. Please note that the review was not influenced by the Sponsor in any way. All opinions expressed here are only my own.
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