2020 Nature Journals Get-away's from Covid
The beginning development of Randy's Digital Nature Journals and a short history of how I came to explore and use multiple types of images as writing prompts for connecting with Nature
Escapes into Nature and Creative Writing During Covid 2020
The 2020 story of developing Randy's styles of Digital Nature Journals (NJ), Reflection Journals (RJ), and combining different image types in these projects.
I have selected pages from early "Nature Journal and Reflective Journals" (NJ RJ) as I worked through the Covid Pandemic to get outside in Nature to observe, find mental peace and quiet, and to re-awaken my creative writing side. I also went back to older Nature Journals I had developed during my time in graduate school in Science Education for a class in 2004. I also continued to keep paper, pencil, colored pencil and other resources making sketches while being in Nature from my times and adventures while hiking, backpacking, camping in my truck camper, and along with walks on the local Greenbelt trails.
I was looking to develop some formats and styles to combine all my observational photographs and other creative images with free verse poetic text, scientific information, general natural history observations, and to express the inner emotional feelings I received from our natural world. This work is still in development to merge the paper and pencil works and enhance them using the many digital technological tools we now have to create image filled Digital Nature Journals with creative writings and observations.
I will be adjusting how I upload previously written Journals. I will be changing the way they were formatted and saved as full page PDF files to allow me to split the pages into smaller sections as the are not as readable as the full pages.
Some NJ's I improved with this modification has made them much easier to read with more zoomed in views of the images and the text.
Please check back in the future as I improve my technologies in this Blog.
Thanks for visiting this BLOG
Randy Puckett
Randy Puckett
Ugly Tree Knots and Burls is from observations I noticed between these two unique trees standing next to each other in the Citico Creek Wilderness in Cherokee National Forest accessed from the Cherohala Parkway up in the mountains from Tellico Plains TN.
I was taking a break from Covid down in the cities of East Tennessee on June 6, 2020 with a hike along the Benton MacKaye Trail. He was a forester who conceived the idea of the Appalachian Trail (AT) which traverses the Appalachian Mountains from North Georgia to Maine covering almost 2,200 total miles.
ATC information :https://appalachiantrail.org/
MacKaye also was a founding member of the Wilderness Society which is dedicated to protecting natural areas and federal public lands in the United States.
This creative writing is a type of double verse poetic dialogue between two trees using poetic styles of imagery and thought provocative text which is pleasant and rhythmic to read.
These trees are given the literary device of personification in they have human qualities.
Of course we know trees have feelings and converse with each other all the time!
Another addition I often use in my Nature Journals is to include some scientific content for the Natural topic being observed and written about. I added information about tree burls at the end of this NJ.
I hope you enjoy the dialogue between these two tree siblings!
To better view each of the images or sections of the Nature Journals below, just left click on one and it will appear enlarged and in a galley view. Use the directional arrows or swipe to scan forward or back. Hit escape to come back to this page view.
When the Covid shutdown began in March 2020 and in my case our school system went virtual for the rest of the school year. I was teaching STEM at the time and I believed my students needed a break from school work in front of their Chromebooks during their day. I worked to get them outside for my lessons as much as I could.
The S in STEM is for Science. I developed several virtual lessons which were based on Phenology, or the study and observations of the timing of natural events. I had my students go outside in their yards or other areas where they were safe from exposure to Covid.
They had to find different examples of changes in plants and since it was spring many plants had flowers, seeds developing, or leaves emerging from buds.
They used their smart phones or the Chromebooks to take pictures of their findings and submit them into a tabular format I developed with guided questions for what they saw in Nature as examples of Phenology.
Link to Tremont Institute Phenology
Another series of virtual lessons I developed were using text readings I wrote with questions and videos. I had gotten links from various sources about the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid (Tsuga canadensis), a non native invasive insect that has been killing many of the large stands of Eastern Hemlocks in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The GSMNP is about 25 miles from William Blount High School where I taught for 17 years.
Many of my STEM students had done introductory lessons where they collected data from the amounts of Hemlock trees dying in the forest from photographs I had taken along the Blue Ridge Parkway of dead Hemlocks. They were familiar with this topic as invasive species were used as a global problem that STEM research and solutions to lessen invasive species required all the 4 fields of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)
Link to Information
Link to Videos
I guess my education work during the 2020 Spring semester about Phenology and Invasive species (Hemlock deaths) were on my mind when I created the very image heavy Leaf Diversity...NJ in May 2020. Both of the topics are well represented in the Leaf Diversity that has non native landscaping species, the unique beauty of hemlock needles, the emergence of both seeds and new leaves from my observations when I was also getting outside in Nature during the early Covid days.
You will see and read poetic repetition of letters and sounds of many of the words, different rhyming portions of the text, and even three Haiku poems.
The visuals are of some unique plant features from these macro or close up photographs. I did my best to describe them with as few power descriptive words that used the poetic devices I mentioned above.
As I work through how to best convey my NJ's and the formats that the Blogger program supports please bear with me as I will experiment with these different features.
I included an original one page Leaf Diversity... NJ format after the split sections of this visual NJ. Please feel free to give me comments and feedback on the good and bad of these different formats for viewing.
The original one page NJ format follows
for Leaf Diversity....
More 2020 Covid days developing Randy's different styles, images to make and include, and formats for these new Digital Natural Journals (NJ). All were able to be converted to split page format for better viewing in this Blog.
I used several different styles of writing for these as I was expanding my creative Digital Nature Journal messages and formats for these one page NJ's.
The key is having great images to serve as writing prompts and maybe a little knowledge of the topic or themes of the NJ content.
Just left click to see in enlarged gallery view.
Sometimes the Nature photos and beauty can be found in town
Remember images can and will
be the creative writing prompts
for your Nature Journals!
Sky and Mountain Personal Reflections
Prayer of the Mountains
May 30, 2020
Less Poetry and more scientific content and information about a Smokies Summer Beauty
Next is a series of sketches on a single paper page using colored pencils and pastel chalks.
I added reflective writing from the sketches while I was sitting along the Middle Prong Stream in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park from April 23, 2006. The healing powers of being in Nature!
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