Join my publication on Substack Mystified, I sat on my porch step last week and googled remove bug poop from vinyl siding. It had to be bug poop, I assumed. What else could it be? Aha! Spores from artillery fungus. Also aptly called sphere thrower. Foiled by the hard black dots After heavily mulching the … Read more
Join my publication on Substack Pop quiz: Do you know where Nature is? Is it in your backyard, because there are more green-growing-things than your front yard? Or is it on your balcony garden if you’re in an apartment? Or maybe it’s only in the park a few blocks, or miles, away? It’s a silly … Read more
Join my publication on Substack “I’ve decided I’ll come up to your place and paint when the colors change,” wrote my friend Sharyn, a watercolor painter, in an email. “You’ll let me know when, right?” Sharyn and I painted outdoors with a group of other landscape painters for several years. A couple of her paintings … Read more
Join my publication on Substack If I had human neighbors close enough to hear me the other evening, they would have thought I was nuts. I walked around both levels of my house commanding the orb weavers and their smaller kin to pack it up and leave the night before I began pressure washing the … Read more
Join my publication on Substack I’ve teased you a couple times about the free email course I was creating. Now it’s time to share the “big reveal,” as they say on the DIY YouTube channels. Phone-Jacked: 7 Days to Retake Control of Your Phone went public last Friday with a classified ad I placed in … Read more
Join my publication on Substack I just finished writing my free email course called Phone-Jacked: 7 Days to Retake Control of Your Phone. It turned out to be a valuable forcing-mechanism: It forced me to clarify my thinking and approach to helping people through The Unplugged Club. That approach is The Nature Response. Below is Lesson 3 … Read more
Join my publication on Substack 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 … Read more
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!” The complaining painters would quickly quit in disgust, which always amused me. East vs West Western landscapes are comparatively easier to … Read more
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. Nature and all its forces, creatures and elements were labeled with the impersonal pronoun it along with everything else in … Read more
Today everyone blames smartphones for the exploding disconnection from Nature. Native Digitals, those 35 and younger, live reality through their screens rather than in the world. And the disconnection is getting worse: GenZ spends an average of 9 hours per day on their phones and prefer to stay at home. But what if the disconnection … Read more