The Reconnect Collection: Ideas to reawaken your Nature connection
The outdoor recreation industry would like us to believe we need their gear and getaways to develop a real connection with Nature.
Hogwash, to put it politely.
We’re wired for Nature — we’re part of Nature and it’s part of us. We can’t not be in Nature. But it’s become a monumental challenge to rekindle and maintain our connection in an increasingly flattened reality of screens.
My intent with this collection of articles is to provoke your curiosity about the non-human, living Earth we share and show you how dead-simple easy is to bring awe and wonder back into our daily lives.
Read what catches your interest, in any order.
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What if a walk in the woods was – illegal?
A fascinating social protest in the UK has awakened awareness of our lost connections with Nature. Echoing the ancient custom, the movement is called “Right to Roam.” Most recently it involved a wealthy landowner in Dartmoor who doesn’t want people walking and camping on the 4,000 acres of a national park he owns. The legal case triggered a countrywide …
Restoring your attention requires no efforting
Most people believe they have to get away from their life – work, demands, email – to recover from mental fatigue and restore their concentration. While nature escapes are a popular way to recharge, they are not the only way. Nor should you wait — that’s a recipe for burnout.
There's more to a walk than meets the eye
Turns out the writers, poets, stoics and philosophers across the centuries were onto something science is finally proving. Those long walks in Nature they were all fond of for figuring stuff out?
The mysteries of interconnection
Mystified, I sat on my porch step and googled remove bug poop from vinyl siding. It had to be bug poop, I assumed. What else could it be?
Are you missing out on the best over-crowded, grid-locked, outdoor vacation of your life?
One of the widespread changes that has stuck since Covid is the surge of interest in outdoor recreation, especially visits to U.S. national parks and public lands. Whether it’s the adoption of a new vacation experience or fear of losing the chance to see iconic landscapes because of wildfires, flooding and climate change, people are hitting the parks in …
Nature connection is as natural as breathing
You’ve likely figured out by now that The Unplugged Club has an ulterior motive, beyond turning you into a clandestine tree hugger. It’s even beyond encouraging you to put down the flat world of screens to discover a new awareness, curiosity and sense of wonder about Nature outside your door.
It's official: Nature cures all modern ills
Nature is quickly becoming the medical answer to many of our modern ills. Doctors around the world are now actively writing “nature prescriptions” for ailments from chronic conditions to a cascade of lifestyle diseases, such as:
The power of the simple act of noticing nature
A recent post on mushrooms and their far-reaching rootmass of mycelia generated the most responses I’ve received on a newsletter topic. Mushrooms, it seems, are a hot topic.
How much do we really know about what’s in the Earth beneath our feet?
Have you heard of mycelium? Mycelium is the root-like structure of a fungus consisting of a mass of branching, thread-like filaments.
What your eyes can't see your ears may hear
Friends visiting from Nevada in mid-April were delighted to hear a tree frog chorus for the first time – a Southern harbinger of spring – as we drove along country roads in the early evening. I’ve never seen a tree frog in the 13 years I’ve lived in North Carolina but I can pick out the distinctive high-pitched sound from a quarter mile away.
Letting the land tell us her name
In late May 2017 on my first visit with my real estate agent to what is now my home, we both noticed an unrecognizable sound below the property, which sits on a mountain ridge. It had that low hum of muffled freeway traffic, but there are no freeways out here on the edge of the wilderness.
When all you see is a wall of green
In 2010 when I painted outdoors weekly with a group of painters we’d occasionally have a landscape painter from the Western US join us. The same complaint cropped up quickly. “It’s too green here!”
What if we asked Nature what [its] pronouns are?
![What if we asked Nature what [its] pronouns are?](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tubK!,w_280,h_280,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5344ebd6-3c20-485b-94ae-62ba1f63f88e_1920x1440.jpeg)
Like you, I was taught in grade-school English that only people qualified for proper pronouns of male and female gender. Pets were granted the grammatical privilege and other animals only if we knew their sex.