nature girl's guide to a beautiful life

almost forgot this was the whole point!

The world is alive all around me.

On hikes, I notice birds swooping and squirrels scrambling in the treetops above. The soft call of crickets at night, their song a choir along with the sounds of the wind breathing in the golden hills.

The world is alive all around me—how lucky am I to witness it at all.

“Oh my goodness!” I giggle, giddy after catching sight of a bird soaring perfectly above the mountains — like it’s performing a choreographed sequence just for me.

On nights like these my hikes usually take twice as long.

Like many others, I grew up with a deep love and appreciation for the Earth and the land around me. The trees I climbed near my childhood home offered a sense of both adventure and safety. Camping trips quickly became my favourite thing in the world—spending sunup to sundown immersed in nature’s beauty.

It brings me solace to remember that Earth lovingly offers us everything we need—water to drink or swim in, a soft patch of grass to rest our heads, a walk amidst trees to calm the chaos inside.

I especially need this reminder on the days when despair and dread about the state of our world seep in through the media and into my thoughts.

take notice of what light 
does—to everything.

—Tess Guinery.

When I entered my early twenties and started living on my own, I felt determined to live a life in alignment with the Earth. Along that journey of discovering what alignment looked like, I was introduced to Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

She begins her book by introducing the concept of the “language of animacy”, an idea that offered me a perspective I’d never encountered before. As an English-only speaker all my life, I hadn’t realized how deeply language shapes the way we relate to the world.

English, which often reduces the living world to inanimate “its”—objects for our use, study, or ownership—is vastly different from many Indigenous languages, where the world is spoken of as animate. Alive.

Not something to be owned or used, but someone to learn from. As she says in the book, our kin!

I once heard it said that the best way to care for the Earth is to build a relationship with your local land. Because once it becomes personal to you, you care about it more. And maybe, just maybe, you inspire someone else to make it personal too.

Maybe it all starts with a little curiosity, a willingness to slow down, and a desire to notice the beauty aground you.

Notice the beauty:

✿ go on walks without distractions — notice the kinds of trees, plants, and flowers that grow in your local area.

✿ study these trees, plants, and flowers — what do their leaves look like, what colour are they? How do the petals of the flower unfold? Pay attention to them.

✿ break off a little piece of sage or spruce and smell it (it’s gorgeous)

✿ write a poem about the way the sun is shining through the trees on a half sunny/half rainy afternoon.

✿ go outside on an evening and stare at the moon

✿ take the scenic route!

✿ take your kayak or paddle board out onto the lake. when you’re calm and quiet on the water, a lot of magical things happen (fish jump, deer come to graze nearby, loons sing their call)

✿ immerse yourself into the feelings that simple beauty brings you! lean into joy!

✿ spend an evening doing nothing in the park. Bring a book, a sketchbook/journal, some water and a snack. Waste time.

Bring it into your daily life:

✿ live with an awareness of the seasons — eat seasonal fruit, celebrate seasonal changes, notice how the earth responds to the changing temperatures.

✿ collect natural herbs for a homemade tea blend. Experiment and play with it until you get it just right.

✿ go to the same spot to sit everyday. notice what happens in that environment and the changes that occur as you return.

✿ gather a bouquet of wildflowers to keep on your bedside table

Stay curious:

✿ make it a goal to learn 10 plants that grow in your local area. Identify them.

✿ make up your own names for 10 plants in your local area. Notice them, name them.

✿ pay attention to the birds — where do they go? What are they doing? What songs do they sing?

✿ notice how the sun’s axis changes throughout the year. can you determine the time of day just by knowing where the sun is?

✿ what kind of clouds are in the sky?

✿ which flowers bloom in spring? In summer? In fall?

I’d love to hear from you:
What’s something beautiful you noticed on a recent walk? Feel free to share a photo or a thought in the comments or the community chat.

Let’s build a little archive of wonder and whimsy together.

That’s all for this Sunday’s slow scroll. I’ll catch ya in the next one <3