Your Ultimate Guide To Planning a Year in Nature: Explore Our Best Adventures

Another year to look forward. Another year to be present and show gratitude. Let’s plan for ways to check in with nature throughout the year.

Buddhist teachings recommended that one flow with the currents of life and trust in the cycle of nature.

Nature helps to restore harmony within us. The peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh (1926-2022) (Public Library) said:

“Learn to transform your garbage into flowers.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

I have found that nature helps to calm the chattering mind. On hiking trails, the space is teeming with life, and whatever the season one can find peace.

Make a Plan for a Year in Nature. Use this as a flexible guide. It’s supposed to make you feel good, not stressed.

Start Your Nature Plan

Whether deliberate or unintentional, there has been a a decline in quality time spent outdoors, whether it’s outdoor time in schools, or adults working in windowless baffle board cubicles in an office.

Can you remember how we were so free in natural spaces as children? We can restore a link to what was once natural.

The poet, Blake, in his songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, notes the loss of Innocence via religious dogma and social restrictions. Nature is the trail back to self discovery and connection.

“Little Lamb who made thee? / Dost thou know who made thee?”  – Blake, Songs of Innocence, The Lamb

Continue the journey through forests, mountains, parks, urban spaces. From sea to sea, to flowers in the room. Nature brings us back to who we truly are, via energy, frequency, and peace, finding our connection to all things.

Nature Ideas Round Up

Here is a round up of ideas to get you started. We begin with the true calender for the year and explain how the one imposed on us actually throws off our natural rhythm.

Reset your year to the original nature based calender and see what happens.

Wake up each morning and greet the dawn.

Embrace nature for a weekend.

Commit to a reading a non-fiction nature book every three months.

Listen to the sounds of nature.

Discover and harvest new foods from nature’s bounty.

Record your how nature transforms you via journaling.

Connect with Indigenous Knowledge

Take counsel from the original inhabitants of the environment. Indigenous peoples traditionally only took what they needed and left the rest to replenish the environment.

In current times, words like ” progress” and and “modernisation” are used to promote things that may not be conducive to the long term health of the planet.

We are now paying the price and many people are looking for a happy medium that combines the old with the new. Find opportunities to visit traditional territories of indigenous peoples in your area. They are many nations which have programs or visitor centres where they are happy to share their traditional knowledge.

Visit a Pow wow.

Touch the earth and ground yourself, allow the energy go through your body.

Capture the moment outdoors, take photos.

Bring nature indoors with indoor plants.

Final Thoughts

Connecting with nature can be done any time of the year, and in a variety of ways as this round up shows. Try as many as possible until you find the one that resonates and adds to your wellbeing.

Let me know your favourites in the comments below.