The hardest part of nature journaling isn’t the sketching and painting—it’s maintaining your practice.
If you are new to nature journaling, or struggling with an ongoing practice, join us for a check-in session to share our experiences and frustrations making nature journaling a regular part of our lives.
The aim of this 90-minute session will be to talk about success or struggles, and our community will help find solutions and suggestions.
We had a lot of great sharing during this workshop with breakout sessions.
Zoom does not support recording individual breakouts, but we were able to record one, and our leaders give synopses of the other two.
Some of the main takeaways and suggestions we have:
Give yourself permission to shape your practice to what works for you.
Be kind to yourself and to your output.
The most important thing to establishing a lasting practice is to make it a habit, and to do that you really do need to make frequent journal entries (at least when you are starting out; those of us who have been doing this for decades, it’s now a habit, so going a week or two without journaling is not going to end our practice).
If you are overwhelmed with journaling daily or even 3-4 times a week, make it a very simplified way of journaling: do a spread in your journal that represents a week, labeling it with the dates. Then, each day add one thing . . . a bird you saw (draw it if you want) or just describe in good notes . . . some phenomenon like leaves budding . . . the weather . . . any observation. You can do this in boxes (seven) or just anywhere on the page spread. By the end of the week you have a nice double-page spread, and your daily practice is supported, well on its way to habit!
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