30 Days Wild - A Piece I Wrote for The Wildlife Trust

Back in May, I received an email from The Wildlife Trust, who had seen my 366 Days Wild blog and been impressed that I'd done the whole year and blogged it. They asked if I would be willing to write a blog post for them all about my 30 / 366 Days Wild experiences and my own connection to nature.

Initially I was unsure as I'm not good at putting thoughts and feelings into words, but they sent me a list of questions for me to answer to help shape the post which really helped! I went from thinking I wouldn't be able to write anything to accidentally sending back an essay (though it did answer all the questions!).

It was due to be published early in June, but then they decided to use it at the end of the month as a bit of inspiration for people to keep enjoying the outdoors and not stop when 30 Days Wild ends. I also wrote another, shorter piece regarding nature and my experience of it (or lack of!) in a school setting, which they plan to publish at a later date.

The Wildlife Trust did edit my post slightly of course and cut out a few words, but not a lot. Here, I'm sharing the original version (as this is my blog, my rules, no word count limits!).
Here goes... 

I think I’ve always felt a strong connection to nature. I grew up in a beautiful corner of the Peak District and had a very free range childhood with a playground that went far beyond the garden and included rocks, moorlands, fields, woods and a river. 

me, on a walk with my parents, aged 2

I consider myself to have had a very privileged childhood in terms of the freedom I had to play outdoors all day long and the encouragement I received from my parents, especially my dad. As well as just being allowed to go out and play out in the woods, fields and river, dad would often accompany me and my sister and he’d teach us about trees, seeds, flowers, birds... I have so many memories of time playing outdoors with my dad - I think my own strong connection to my ‘inner child’ was inherited from him as he used to have as much fun as we did. At his suggestion, we once bought an inflatable dinghy, pumped it up and took it down to the river where we built a dam and had an evening sailing before taking the dam down again! He’d buy us disposable cameras occasionally and we’d go off taking photographs while we were out playing all day and we had our own set of tools in his workshop which we were allowed to use for whatever purposes we fancied (within reason!). It wasn’t just our close surroundings we were encouraged to love and appreciate but the much wider natural world too - my dad has always been a keen astronomer and had a little observatory with a powerful telescope. In school holidays (or special astronomical events!) we’d pack a little midnight feast, fill a flask with hot chocolate and spend a few hours in his observatory whilst Dad showed us things through the telescope and taught us the constellations, naked eye planets and how to star-hop. I’ll never forget the first time I saw a shooting star, or the first time I saw Saturn and a comet through the telescope and I still remember the pride I would feel when Dad would point to a star, planet or constellation and ask me what it was and I’d know it!

From the age of about 10 I was allowed to explore further afield and I was allowed to walk for miles and be out on the rocks by myself and as an adult I’m so thankful that I was given so much freedom and raised in such a beautiful area. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, I thought everyone was like me and spent most of their time outdoors, with great places to play and walk. It wasn’t until I moved on to middle school that I began to realise that some people only had a street to play on, that some children didn’t even have gardens and then I started to become aware of how lucky I was to live where I did!

My parents had purposely moved into the house I was raised in because they’d had rural upbringings in the Peak District themselves and wanted their children to have the same freedom that they’d had as children and I’ll be forever grateful to them for that.  The upbringing I had and the amount of time I spent enjoying the great outdoors meant that I never had a sense of being separate from nature. It’s only as an adult, and especially in recent years as we hear more and more about how disconnected people - and children especially - are from nature, that I realise that I’ve grown up feeling like just another aspect of nature; that I’m just another species in the natural world and that I’m connected to everything and part of nature itself. It took me a little while to understand that a lot of people view themselves as separate to the natural world and that still doesn’t really make sense to me as we evolved here on Earth just like everything else, so how can we be separate and not a part of nature ourselves?!

Now I’m in my thirties, I feel I truly appreciate the childhood I had and fully understand the person it shaped me to become. I know now that nature is as essential to my well-being as the basic human needs of water, food, shelter and so on and I can’t imagine a life where I didn’t get to appreciate everything from the far reaching views, wide open skies and stunning scenery I have around me…

down to the smallest of things, like watching an ant carrying something back to the nest or noticing a weed growing in a crack somewhere.

It seems the older I get, the more I realise just how essential it is for me to spend time in nature and after a day at home I find myself getting restless and needing to head outdoors for a while. 

There are times, when life is busy or I have a headache or feel I don’t have the time or energy to go out to play, but sometimes, I force myself to head out and I’ll see something magical, like a tawny owl or a cool beetle, or enjoy the birdsong or the earthy smells, and I’ll come home feeling reinvigorated and so very glad I went outdoors. It was this that partly inspired me to sign up for the first 30 Days Wild in 2015.

I signed up straight away when I found out about 30 Days Wild as I thought it was an absolutely brilliant idea to encourage people to get out and enjoy being outdoors and, even as someone who spends a lot of time outside and who always notices what’s happening in the natural world around me, I knew that I could be more ‘wild’ if I tried. I didn’t want to miss out on the fun and thought that as well as getting lots of wild inspiration from other participants, 30 Days Wild would give me an incentive to head outdoors regardless of how busy I’d been, how horrible the weather might be, how tired I felt or how much I just wanted to get cosy with a book instead!

I wasn’t wrong! From the very first day, I was committed to achieving my goal to spend time outdoors every day in June and I had a self-imposed rule that anything less than thirty minutes didn’t count!   I had some brilliant wild days last June - many would have happened without 30 Days Wild, like the puffin and gannet cruise I went on from Bempton Cliffs (that’s something I do every year) or the guided wildflower walk I went on with Derbyshire Wildlife Trust, but there were plenty of times when I went outdoors because I had to, because I committed to 30 Days Wild.  These times included the walk in the woods in the rain after a very busy day…

 http://louises30dayswild.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/day-1.html

The time I spent hunting for patterns in nature in the garden…

http://louises30dayswild.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/day-22.html

The walk I took alongside a canal one evening…

http://louises30dayswild.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/day-23.html

and the evening I went out to sit amongst the cotton grass on the moorlands and watch the sunset.

http://louises30dayswild.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/day-30_30.html

All that lovely time outdoors that I probably wouldn’t have experienced, were it not for 30 Days Wild!

Living in a rural area and being pretty outdoorsy anyway, I didn’t think I would get a huge amount out of taking part in 30 Days Wild beyond the satisfaction of completing it and of course, enjoying my time outdoors, as I always do, but I definitely misjudged the influence 30 Days Wild would have on me! Taking part in 30 Days Wild really opened my eyes to just how easy it is, when you put in a little effort, to spend time outdoors every single day. Even on my busiest days, I still made sure I had at least half an hour outdoors and it would often be more than the half hour because once I was out, I didn’t want to go indoors again.

I enjoyed taking part in 30 Days Wild so much that I actually didn’t stop and I’m just completing 366 Days Wild now - a whole year of wild!  It was partly realising how easy it was to make time to go outdoors each day and partly how much I enjoyed those outdoors moments - moments I know I’d not have experienced were I not taking part in 30 Days Wild - that encouraged me to carry it on for a whole year. I did have to relax my rules a little in order to achieve it though. Straight away I decided that the 30 minute rule I had for June wouldn’t work for a whole year and I knew the winter months, those days when I leave home in the morning when it’s dark and then get home after dark, would be difficult. I also thought about how I might keep my daily wild time going if I was ill or if life got really busy, as it sometimes does, so my minimum criteria was that I had to spend a minute or two outdoors every day and take a photo of something in nature every day. That meant I’d have a picture to share on my Wild Blog every day and I tied in 366 Days Wild with Project 365 (a daily photo project) which I’ve been doing since 2012. Looking at my 365 project photos also encouraged me to go ahead with 366 Days Wild as I realised that the majority of my photos there were nature based anyway!

There have most certainly been days over the past year when I’ve found 366 Days Wild  difficult, days when I’ve wondered how I’m going to squeeze in my wild time or struggled to find something to take a photo of. There have been days I’ve worried that I’m not being wild enough, that I’m too repetitive or too boring, and yet here I am, at the end of the year, with at least a photo for each day and many, many days where I’ve had some great outdoor adventures. Even on the hardest days, I’ve never regretted committing to 366 Days Wild and if anyone out there is wondering if they can really achieve 30 Days Wild I’d say go for it! You won’t know if you don’t give it a try and I’m sure that once you start, you’ll find it’s easier than you think to find time for some wild moments every day,  and before you know it, you’ll be having a brilliant time engaging with nature and suddenly June will be almost over and you won’t want it end! You’re free to make 30 Days Wild suit you and take part in whatever ways you can and even if you can’t manage to be outdoors every single day, just taking part on days you can is better than not getting involved at all, so go ahead and join in - you won’t regret it!

I’ll be taking part in 30 Days Wild again next month (what’s 30 more days after a whole year?!) and am sure it’s going to be just as good as last year!

(Written in May 2016)