Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Connecting with Nature

17 Ways to Celebrate the First Day of Summer

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Tuesday, June 21 is the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. The sun will bathe the Arctic Circle in 24 hours of daylight, and ancient monuments around the world will align with the sun. Historically Europeans celebrated the summer solstice by gathering plants and holding bonfires and festivals. Native American plains tribes held sun dances.

The first day of summer is a great time to start new family traditions. Seasonal celebrations are a fun way to connect with nature and they can be as easy or elaborate as you want them to be. Here are a few ideas:

1.  Take a trip to the library a few days before your celebration and pick out books about summer. Some of my family’s favorite summer picture books include:

  • Before the Storm by Jan Yolen
  • Summertime Waltz by Nina Payne
  • Canoe Days by Gary Paulsen
  • Sun Dance Water Dance by Jonathan London
  • Summer is Summer by Phillis and David Gershator
  • Under Alaska’s Midnight Sun by Deb Venasse.

For adult reading, check out these lists of 2011 summer must-reads compiled by NPR, Newsweek, and Oprah.

2.  Place a bouquet of roses, lilies, or daisies in your family members’ bedrooms while they sleep, so they wake to fresh summer flowers.

3.  Find a special place outside to watch the sunrise and sunset. You can find out what time the sun will rise and set where you live here.

4.  Eat breakfast outside.

5.  Trace each other’s shadows throughout the day to note the sun’s long trip across the sky.

6.  Take a camping trip. Light a fire at night to celebrate the warmth of the sun. Sleep outside. Wake with the sun.

7.  Go on a nature hike. Bring along guidebooks to help you identify birds, butterflies, mushrooms, or wildflowers.

8.  Make flower chains or a summer solstice wreath.

9.  Display summer decorations: seashells, flowers, sand dollars, or whatever symbolizes summer in your family.

10.  Gather or plant Saint John’s Wort. Traditionally Europeans harvested the plant’s cheerful yellow flowers on the first day of summer, dried them, and made them into a tea on the first day of winter. The tea supposedly brought the summer sunniness into the dark winter days. If you don’t have any Saint John’s Wort in your garden, consider planting it. It is  an incredibly useful herb, and it thrives in poor soil with little attention. Find out more about it here.

11.  Visit a U-pick farm to harvest strawberries, snap peas, or whatever is in season where you live. Find a “pick your own” farm near you here.

12.  Make a summer feast. Eat exclusively from your garden or the farmer’s market to celebrate the bounties of summer in your area.

13.  Host a “locavore” potluck.

14.  Turn off all the indoor lights, light candles, and eat dinner outside.

15.  Play outside games, watercolor, or decorate the sidewalks with chalk until the sun sets.

16.  Read aloud from The Summer Solstice by Ellen Jackson.

17.  Read aloud, watch, or put on your own rendition of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. For kids, check out the book A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Kids by Lois Burdett or Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Kids: 3 melodramatic plays for 3 group sizes by Brendan P. Kelso.

Need more inspiration? Check out these resources:

Happy May Day

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When I was a kid, every May 1, I accompanied a friend’s family in their festivities. We made homemade baskets, filled them with flowers, hung them on neighbors doorknobs, and ran away. Since it wasn’t my family’s tradition, I never understood why or what we were celebrating.

It turns out that May Day was traditionally a pagan holiday practiced throughout Europe in honor of the end of the dormant winter months. Festivities varied from country to country, but dancing around a Maypole with ribbons or streamers has been a common activity in modern times.

May Day is a simple, fun, and earth-friendly way to celebrate the beginning of spring and share some of your blooms, plants, seeds, or handicrafts with your neighbors. Want some inspiration for homemade baskets? Check out these resources:

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10 Aha Moments in 2010

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You know that feeling you get when someone says or writes something far better than you could have? I love that feeling. Here are 10 of the more memorable times it happened to me in 2010:

When anthropologists spend time with aboriginal peoples, one of the very first things they almost always comment on is that these are folks who spend so much time with their loved ones that they almost have no concept of privacy the way we do. I tend to think that is the default setting for the human brain and human psyche. I believe it’s time that we start living as Americans as if relationships are the things that matter to us the most, not  our achievement, not our possessions, not our money. – Dr. Stephen S. Ilardi

Frugality is not the same thing as cheapness … Frugality is the exact opposite. Frugality is an embracing of quality. It’s an embracing of experiences. It’s really trying to look at, what are we spending our money on? Why are we spending this money? – Chris Farrell

For the privileged, the pleasure of staying home means being reunited with, or finally getting to know, or finally settling down to make the beloved place that home can and should be, and it means getting out of the limbo of nowheres that transnational corporate products and their natural habitats—malls, chains, airports, asphalt wastelands—occupy. It means reclaiming home as a rhythmic, coherent kind of time. – Rebecca Solnit

What’s really sad to me is not that people don’t send their kids out to play [anymore]. Let’s be clear what we’re talking about: get up in the morning, walk out the door, say, “Bye Mom,” and don’t come back ‘til dinnertime. And your mom has no idea where you are, or who you’re hanging out with, or what you’re doing. It’s just not an issue. That’s the kind of freedom we’re talking about. And what’s sad is not just that my kids don’t get that, that I don’t let them do that, that I don’t feel like it’s possible anymore somehow, but if I did … and when we do send our kids outside, there’s no one out there to play with. They’re just in this deserted moonscape, where something terrible happened to all the children, and they’ve been taken away. Where are they all? They’re all inside. It’s not right, and I think we know it’s not right, and I think it’s a persistent source of guilt for parents. – Michael Chabon

Whatever work I am doing –  editing a magazine or lecturing or whatever other work I am doing – I never hurry. … I say, there’s plenty of time. I don’t feel any kind of stress or strain when I do something. I do slowly, and I do with love and with care, and that way I can live a simple and slow life. I do only one thing at a time, and when I’m doing that thing, I do only that thing. – Satish Kumar

Somewhere along the line, I had stopped believing the evidence that was before me and started believing one of the central myths of modern American culture: that a family requires a pile of money just to survive in some sort of comfort and that “his and her” dual careers were an improvement over times past. – Shannon Hayes

I’m critical of these focuses on individual lifestyle changes, you know it’s our fault that there’s global warming because we didn’t ride our bike, or we didn’t recycle, or we didn’t carry our own bag to the store. Of course I think we should do all those things and we should definitely strive to live as low impact as possible. But we’re operating within a system where the current is moving us toward greater ecological devastation. So these individual actions that we can do, it’s kind of like getting better and better at swimming upstream. …. Rather than nagging our friends to take public transportation even if it takes five times as long and costs twice as much money, let’s work together to get better public transportation, so that the more ecological action is the new default. We need to make doing the right thing as easy as falling off a log… – Annie Leonard

We are so used to being in our metal-and-glass boxes that we forget how wonderful the rain is. And when the weather is good, cars isolate you from that. You don’t get to feel the sun on your shoulders, the wind in your face, the fresh smell of licorice when you pass a certain plant, see the squirrels dart past or the ducks mock you with their quack. – Leo Babauta

This is an increasingly noisy era — people shout at each other in print, at work, on TV. I believe the volume is directly related to our need to be listened to. In public places, in the media, we reward the loudest and most outrageous. People are literally clamoring for attention, and they’ll do whatever it takes to be noticed. Things will only get louder until we figure out how to sit down and listen. – Margaret J. Wheatley

Thus began my “secular Sabbath” — a term I found floating around on blogs — a day a week where I would be free of screens, bells and beeps. An old-fashioned day not only of rest but of relief. … Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, I experienced what, if I wasn’t such a skeptic, I would call a lightness of being. I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think and distance from normal demands. I got to stop. – Mark Bittman

* Don’t forget, tomorrow is the first day of winter and the shortest day of the year. The solstice this year coincides with a full moon – a rare event. (The next time it will happen is on December 21, 2094.) And this year there will also be a total lunar eclipse on the winter solstice starting at 1:33 A.M. eastern standard time. It’s a special day for so many reasons. You can find simple ways to celebrate here.

Who or what inspired you this year?

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Celebrate the First Day of Winter

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December 21 is the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. Locales above the Arctic Circle, including parts of Canada, Alaska, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Greenland, and the very northern tip of Iceland will experience 24 hours of total darkness. You can find out when the sun will rise and set where you live here.

Winter was a long, dark, and difficult time for many of our forebears. The solstice provided an opportunity for people to celebrate the return of more daylight.

How did ancient people celebrate?

  • Gift-giving

The ancient Romans exchanged candles and other gifts during Saturnalia, their week-long solstice celebration.

  • Role-switching

In Persia, the king changed places with one of his subjects on the winter solstice, and the subject was crowned during an elaborate street party.

In Rome, masters and servants switched roles; senators wore simple, rather than elaborate togas; men sometimes dressed as women; fights and grudges were forgotten; and other everyday conventions were put aside.

  • Candle-lighting

In England and Scandinavia, people lit a Yule log, or oak branch, which was often replaced by a large candle that burned throughout the day.

  • Bonfires

Japanese Shinto farmers lit fires on the mountain sides to welcome back the sun.

  • Mistletoe and Evergreen Trees

The British Celts put mistletoe on their altars. And the Germans and Romans decorated their houses with evergreen trees, wreaths, and garlands as a symbol of life and renewed fertility.

  • Sun Festivals

The Hopi celebrated the return of the sun with ceremonies. Priests dressed in animal skins with feathers in their head-dresses to look like the rays of the sun.

Why celebrate the first day of winter?

The holiday season is busy enough for most of us. Why add anything else to the to-do list?

Celebrating the first day of each season has many benefits. It offers the perfect opportunity to:

  • Note the cyclical changes in the soil, sky, trees, plants, and wildlife.
  • Reflect on the lessons each time of year imparts. Winter, for example, reminds us of the importance of quiet, rest, and dormancy.
  • Learn about different celebrations around the world.
  • Celebrate! And seasonal celebrations are affordable, nature-based, and as easy or elaborate as you want them to be.
  • Be grateful for the gifts of food, family, and friendship.

The key to celebrating the first day of winter, when most of us are busy planning other celebrations, is to keep it simple, and choose traditions that give you time to relax and reflect.

Some ideas:

  • Establish a table-top, shelf, or mantel to display a seasonal tableau. On the first day of winter, replace the fall decorations with evergreen boughs, pine cones, candles, mistletoe, or whatever symbolizes fall in your family.
  • Collect books about the seasons at yard sales, used-book stores, and thrift shops year-round. Choose a special basket or shelf for them, and change them out on the first day of each season. Or take a trip to the library a few days before your celebration. Some of my family’s favorite winter picture-books are: Stella, Queen of the Snow by Mary-Louise Gay; The Big Snow by Berta Hader; The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats; A Kitten Tale by Eric Rohmann; Snow by Cynthia Rylant; Winter is the Warmest Season by Lauren Stringer; and Owl Moon by Jane Yolen.
  • Read aloud from The Winter Solstice by Ellen Jackson.
  • Go for a nature walk or go cross-country skiing, and enjoy the brisk air and winter scenery.
  • Watch the sun rise and set.
  • Make a seasonal feast, with foods like beets, winter squash, potatoes, onions, kale, cabbage, or parsnips.
  • Eat by candlelight.
  • Blow out the candles and turn off the lights after dinner, sit together quietly, and experience and reflect on darkness.
  • Share one thing you’ve lost and one thing you’ve gained over the past year.
  • Bring an evergreen bough inside and make it into a wishing tree. Secure the bough in a bucket with rocks. Cut leaves out of green construction paper. Have each person write down a wish for the coming year on each leaf. Hang the leaves on the tree using a hole punch and yarn or ribbon.
  • Sit around the fire or cuddle under blankets and tell stories about your best and worst holiday memories.

Resources:

  • The Winter Solstice by John Matthews
  • The Book of the Year: A Brief History of Our Seasonal Holidays by Anthony Aveni
  • Celebrate the Solstice by Richard Heinberg
  • Ceremonies of the Seasons by Jennifer Cole
  • The Winter Solstice by Ellen Jackson

(Updated version of post from December 14, 2009.)

How do you celebrate the change in the seasons?

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6 Ways to Nurture Your Family’s Connection with Nature

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Most of the new parents I know are anything but negligent. They take their toddlers to storytime and enroll them in swim courses, dance classes, and music lessons. They serve fresh vegetables, read picture books, learn baby signs, and take workshops in infant massage and child development. A storytime leader at my local library jokingly refers to my generation of moms and dads as “PhD parents.”

But with all the scheduling, classes, and shuttling around, we may be in danger of neglecting something that’s actually more crucial to our children’s health and development than workshops and classes – unstructured playtime in nature. Numerous scholars and environmental psychologists are sounding an alarm, arguing that kids today are at risk for developing what Richard Louv, author of the 2005 bestseller Last Child in the Woods and Chairman of Children and Nature Network, calls “Nature-Deficit Disorder.”

Humans need to experience nature.

Both adults and children have an innate affinity for the natural world and an urge to connect with other forms of life which Harvard researcher Edward O. Wilson coined “biophilia”. Unconvinced? Consider the following findings:

  • Workers who could view a nature setting from work were more satisfied, felt better challenged by their jobs, and reported better health than co-workers who couldn’t view nature. (Kaplan, R. & Kaplan, S. (1989). The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.)
  • Surgical patients randomly assigned to a room with a view of trees required less pain medicine, healed faster, and were discharged sooner than those with no window or a view of a brick wall. (Ulrich, R. (1984). View Through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery. Science, 224, 420-421)
  • A view of green plants and vistas helped highly-stressed rural children relieve anxiety. The more plants, green views, and access to natural play areas the kids had, the less stressed they were. (“Nearby Nature: A Buffer of Life Stress Among Rural Children.” Environment and Behavior. Vol. 35:3, 311-330.)
  • Girls living in inner-city Chicago Public Housing with views of greenery had more self-discipline, increased concentration, and reduced impulsive behavior than girls the same age living in identical housing in more barren areas. (Journal of Environmental Psychology, 22, 49-63.)

Unstructured play, especially outdoors, benefits kids.

We don’t just need a view of nature either. We need to get out in it. Research, like studies conducted by doctors Hillary L. Burdette and Robert C. Whitaker, has shown that playing outdoors alone or with friends, siblings, or parents not only helps kids stay fit, it helps them :

  • pay attention
  • solve problems
  • sleep better
  • interact with others
  • avoid depression, anxiety, and aggression.

Kids are communing less with nature.

The research may be in, but those long summers many of us remember from childhood, where we roamed the neighborhood, collected bugs, made mud pies, and headed out for  week-long family camping trips seem to be going extinct. Children’s playtime fell 25% between 1981 and 1997, and that trend has undoubtedly continued in the last decade.  Moreover, by 1990, the radius kids were allowed to roam shrunk to 1/9 of what it was in 1970.

Why?

  • We’re busy. Americans work about five weeks more per year than we did in 1970. And the bad economy is making people even more hesitant to take time off. When workers are able to take a few days off, many feel they should stay connected to work via cell phones, laptops, and blackberries.
  • TVs, computers, video games, and hand-held electronic devices compete for our attention. The average person watches more than four hours of TV a day.
  • We’ve become scared of nature. The widespread fear of sun exposure in the last few decades (possibly resulting in an epidemic of Vitamin D deficiency) exemplifies how anxious many of us have become about the Great Outdoors.

6 Ways to Nurture Your Family's Connection with Nature #parenting #nature

Six easy ways to re-connect with nature

1. Institute a family green hour.

If you’re a scheduler, pencil a “green hour” into each day. At that time, let your kids enjoy unstructured playtime in the backyard, a garden, a neighborhood park, or another safe and accessible green space.

Remember, connecting with nature is necessary for adults too. During your family’s green hour, get outside, work in the garden, draw or write in a nature journal, or just relax and observe your surroundings. You can connect with other families who schedule a daily green hour here.

2. Take a nature walk.

Pack a lunch and head to the forest or the city park. Nature walking is not the  time for feeling the burn. Set a slow pace and observe birds, plants, tracks, insects, scat, rocks, and the sky. Bring along binoculars, a magnifying glass, field guides, or just your curiosity.

3. Feed the birds.

Install a bird feeder outside one of your windows, and observe the birds that come and go. Feeders don’t have to be expensive. Kids can even make their own. Read up on what kinds of birds live in your neighborhood. Different birds like different kinds of feeders. Don’t stress if you don’t see any action right away. It takes awhile for birds to find a new feeder. Attract even more birds to your yard by designing a bird-friendly landscape.

4. Watch the sky.

If you can see the stars from your backyard or patio, make a weekly stargazing date with your family. Find tips for what to look for each week here. You can also track the moon’s cycle here.

If you can’t see the stars from your abode, check out your local astronomy club. They often host free dark sky meet ups, where you can look through telescopes and learn about the constellations from dedicated stargazers.

5. Stare at the Clouds.

Connecting with nature doesn’t have to be hard work. Stretch out on the grass and gaze up. If you like what you see, check out the Cloud Appreciation Society’s website, or get your hands on a copy of one of their books: The Cloudspotter’s Guide and The Cloud Collector’s Handbook.

6. Take a Camping Trip.

If you’re trying to save cash on your summer vacation this year, camping is the way to go. You’ll need some basic gear – a tent, sleeping bags, a flashlight, water, a first aid kit, and plenty of food and water. You’ll probably also want a lantern, camp stove, and a good book.

You don’t have to go far from home, but the more off the beaten path, the better. Resist the impulse to over plan. Enjoy waking with the sun, spending long days wandering and relaxing, and talking and singing around the campfire at night. (Tip: leave the cell phone in the car.)

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How does your family connect with nature? I’d love to hear your ideas.

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Out of the Wild

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Colorado Central Magazine recently published my humorous essay “Out of the Wild.”

Out of the Wild

by Abby Quillen

I grew up in Central Colorado, and most weekends my family piled into a canary-yellow 1975 Chevy pickup and pitched down rutted-out, rock-strewn roads to hike, explore, or cross-country ski at places with names like Mosquito Pass, Missouri Gulch, and Cochetopa Creek.

By the time my sister and I were 18, we’d both sucked in the thin air on top of a 14,000 foot mountain, run across high-mountain meadows, visited too many ghost towns to list, waded barefoot in ice-cold streams, and spent countless nights sleeping with only a tent and a sleeping bag between our bodies and the hard, cold ground.

Like any wilderness adventures, our outings weren’t always predictable or safe. My dad delighted in driving down twisting and switch-backed mountain roads, often with precipitous drop offs on one side. My mom spent most of our rides clutching the truck’s dashboard, taking in sharp intakes of air through her teeth. “Slow down, Ed,” she’d hiss. “Watch the road.”

Despite my mom’s careful backseat driving, my dad managed to get our truck stuck in some precarious places, notably on a ledge on Mount Princeton and another time in the mud up the North Fork.

Both my sister and I have scars to remember our excursions. When Columbine was nine, she talked my dad into letting her skip school and accompany him and a friend on a cross-country ski trip over Old Monarch Pass. They ended up stranded for several hours after nightfall, and my sister got frostbite on one of her feet.

A few years later, when I was eight, I raced my cousins down a steep section of the Colorado Trail during a family camping trip. I tripped and gashed my upper lip, scraped my chin, and more permanently, chipped my front tooth.

Today my own son is almost two, so I reflect on my childhood quite a bit. When my husband and I aren’t changing diapers or trying to serve a balanced diet to someone who spurns vegetables, we converse about how we might not ruin the little fellow.

We live in Eugene, Oregon, and there’s plenty of wilderness to explore around here. But we mostly amble down sidewalks, explore city parks, and bike down paved paths.

While I delighted in marmot and pica sightings as a kid, my son is more familiar with city creatures – the gray squirrels who run along our fence and taunt our cats, the ducks and nutrias who swim around the litter in the canal by our house, and the seagulls who dive for trash in the grocery store parking lot.

My husband and I want to get out in the wilderness more. But we tend to gravitate toward activities that fit into our son’s nap schedule and where there’s no danger he’ll toddle off a cliff face.

I don’t think we’re alone. In the 30 years between my second birthday and my son’s, everyone’s gotten more concerned about safety. We’re supposed to strap my son into a car seat until he’s seven. And according to Oregon law, he should wear a helmet when he’s riding his Strider bike, which doesn’t even have pedals.

Lately some folks are decrying the increased restrictions on children. Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, warns against something called nature deficit disorder. And movements with names like Free-Range Parenting are cropping up.

Of course I don’t want my son to be deficient in anything, especially something as integral to my childhood as being outdoors. So last weekend my husband and I decided it was time to introduce my son to the wilderness. We were heading across the Cascades to visit my sister in Bend, and nothing says nature like crisp, high-desert air, windswept expanses and snow-capped mountains.

But on our first day in Bend, after my son took his nap and we were all ready for an afternoon hike, the sky turned black and rain started pelting from the sky. We decided to head to a pub for an early dinner instead.

The next day we’d planned a visit to the High Desert Museum, but afterward, we stopped for a hike at the nearby Newberry Volcano. It was a scenic jaunt to the caldera, and my son managed the two miles mostly by himself. But the trail was paved, so it didn’t exactly feel like a wilderness excursion.

No problem, my husband and I thought. We’d just stop for a hike on our way back to Eugene the next day. The drive is beautiful, with dense Douglas fir forests and breathtaking views of Mount Jefferson and Three Fingered Jack. There would be numerous places to stop for a hike.

When we saw the sign for the Headwaters of the Metolius, I told my husband, “This is it. I’ve heard it’s beautiful.” So we followed the signs, parked, and started walking … on an asphalt path. It’s well worth the short walk to see the wide, sparkling Metolius River bubble out of an underground spring. But a hike it is not.

“We’ll just stop somewhere else,” my husband assured me as we got back in the car. But my son had other ideas. By the time we turned back onto Highway 126 he was fast asleep.

We’ll have to save my son’s introduction to the wilderness for another day. I’m hoping maybe my parents will be up for a hike when we visit Colorado this summer. Will it really hurt anything if my son wears a helmet on the outing?

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