I can be found at http://kaleidescopeliving.wordpress.com/

I only use this blog for making comments in other blogger blogs.

naturalist bookshelf for the region along the southern shores of Lake Michigan

In addition to a wide variety of general field guides, I have collected several area specific guides since beginning my explorations of Northern Indiana and Southwest Michigan. To identify the flora and fauna of the area, I consult the following:

Birds of Indiana Field Guide (pocket version) and Birds of Michigan Field Guide with CD of songs and calls which I purchased at Fernwood.

While not necessarily a good choice for beginners, Indiana Wildflowers provides a comprehensive guide to area plants. For those just getting started, I would suggest something arranged by color of the flower rather than by botantical families.

101 Trees of Indiana is one of the best tree field guides I have encountered.

Despite having maps of distributions only for Michigan, Butterflies of Michigan is a good resource for this area.

For getting to know the area more generally and for remembering to see the magic in the world around me, Great Lakes Nature: An Outdoor Year is a wonderful resource.

For creating more natural habitats around your home, I recommend Native Alternatives to Invasive Plants. Granted this is not specifically about the region where I live but still very useful. I have read the library copy and will own my own as soon as I own a yard of my own. The structure of the books is introducing a non-native and often problematic plant and then identifying native species with similar characteristics.

For putting the ecological systems of the dunes in context, I like Dune Country: A Hiker's Guide to the Indiana Dunes. Though not about nature specifically, I also find Indiana Off The Beaten Path to be useful in my area explorations.

Two of my favorite nature magazines are Outdoor Indiana and Nature Photographer. One of the resources I am still lacking is a good guide to dragonflies and damselflies; unfortunately the one I want is out of print and very expensive.

August Explorations (Schoolhouse Shops and Beverly Shores Beaches)

During August of 2006, I discovered a few of what have come to be a few of my favorite places. Among them was the shore Lake Michigan near Beverly Shores.

I also began to discover the joys of the local food seasons in Northwest Indiana. One farmer's market that I found was located at the Schoolhouse Shops near I-12 in Furnessville, Indiana.

The bounty of August was a pleasure not just the taste buds but also to the eyes and nose.

The choices in August included summer squash, tomatoes, sunflower blossoms, peppers, beans, blueberries, basil, new potatoes, fresh corn, pears, peaches, blackberries, and even the first of the apples for the year.

Tomorrow Red Mill Park, blossoms, and and winged creatures.

Exploring Indiana (1)

My exploration of outdoor spaces in Indiana began in July of 2006. As I settled in a life in Porter and LaPorte Counties, I began to make comparisons between places I had lived before and my new home. One of the first pleasures was discovering that there are sometimes days in August that don't require air conditioning.

I also discovered my daily life was filled with amazing views such as this pond where I work:

A few months later the pond was lovely in a whole new way:

By winter it had a lovely character of yet another sort:

The rest of campus was just as lovely.

By the the end of August I was settling into my new home and expanding my mental map of my new territory. It seemed that each week brought wonderful new surprises. Some such as this field of sunflowers clearly qualify as “modest astonishments, friendly shocks, sweet anomalies.” (from the definition of miribilia provided on page 175 of Pronoia; for more about this book and term see this post).

How nature plays a part in my life (1)

One of the component parts of my life is a reverence for and love of nature. This has been true for as long as I can remember. For me nature is the place where I find solace; the place I turn when the things happening in my life become to much and I need a reality break. It is the also the best friend I turn to when I feel elated because it is a beautiful day and I want to play. Time spent wandering in the woods is how I reward myself for accomplishments. In short nature wraps up the feelings one might get from a best friend, a favorite aunt, and a wise mentor.

These are a few of the places that I have sought solace and respite from the world:

My first hideaway in nature was an old mulberry tree – behind the house where I grew was a closed alley and a drainage creek with was called the creek. The creek was itself a source of delight. Each summer it was bordered by bachelor’s buttons and the cottonwood that stood where tree row met open area would be covered with monarch butterflies during their annual migrations.

Just across the creek there was a grassy slope that led to a sharp drop off. A large branch from an old mulberry tree hung out over the drop off. By scooting along that branch to the trunk of the tree I could sit much higher in the tree than I could have climbed. The tree was just far enough from home to give me a breather from the stressful situations there but close enough to hear my father’s yell and run back before he became too angry. Books have also been a constant in my life and that crook up in the mulberry tree was the scene in which I read a great many books while serenaded by birds and snacked on mulberries in the summer.

While 17 I lived with my half-sister and a tree row with mulberry bushes was once more my sanctuary from a confusing time in my life. This time the tree row bordered the pasture and my seat was a fall log. It was on that log that I built walls around my emotions that would take decades to disassemble.

While living in Norman, Oklahoma, it was Sutton Wilderness where I wandered and pondered and allowed the sun, the breeze, the birds, and the shifting seasons to offer solace and inspiration.

During graduate school in Baton Rouge, I had a choice of places to commune with nature. One of my favorites was Hilltop Arboretum. One of my favorite discoveries there was the beauty berry. When the weather or the mosquitoes made the outside less appealing, I could find a comfortable chair at the Bluebonnet Branch of the East Baton Rouge Parish Library system and look out the floor to ceiling windows at life along the edge of the swamp. Though not entirely safe, Baton Rouge offered the possibilities of long walks along the Mississippi River levees; it was there that I discovered the hypnotic appeal of large bodies of water.

Once I left Baton Rouge, I spent six years in places with far fewer options for wandering alone. Though the first four years I was in Orlando which has reasonable proximity to the Atlantic. For me the ocean was a case of love at first sight. Well technically that would be love at first feel and hear; I couldn’t really see the Atlantic during our first meeting. My view of oceans was forever shaped by the fact that I first made my way on to a beach at about 2 a.m. as tropical storm force winds from Hurricane Irene were reaching shore in Cocoa Beach. It wasn’t the wisest thing I have ever done but the experience of playing in the surf in the darkness, in a party dress no less, as the wind and the crashing waves obscured all other sounds makes the Top 20 list of experiences in my life. In calmer conditions, if I need to sort a big problem out there nothing that works better for me than walking for a very long time along the edge of a large body of water

Just over a year ago, I moved to northwest Indiana and suddenly had at my disposable an abundance of places to wander through relatively natural settings. On top of that there are noticeable seasons to provide an ever changing set of new discoveries. Some of my favorite places here are the Indiana Dunes State Park, Chelberg Farm in the Indiana National Lake Shore area, Fernwood Botanical Gardens near Niles, Michigan, Taltree Arboretum near Valparaiso, Coffee Creek Watershed Preservation Area, and Red Mill County Park in LaPorte County. Three of these are within 10 minutes of my house; one is within 10 minutes of my office and the other two are within 90 minutes.

More about my Indiana haunts in tomorrow’s post.

Why Kaleidoscope Living and what do I mean by it?

For years I have dreamed of having a small shop the who’s name would be Kaleidoscope. It would a shop that sold the things I love (herbal soaps, books, wind chimes, great coffee mugs, and anything else, captured my fancy. A pipe dream but a pleasant one.

This blog and its title gained a bit more life when I read Kaleidoscope: Ideas + Projects to Spark Your Creativity by Suzanne Simanaitis. At the start of her book she discusses how the books title came to be. In doing so she talks about the meaning of the word kaleidoscope and she notes that it translates from “the original Greek as ‘beautiful form’ and is defined as a ‘series of changing phases.’”

She goes on to talk about how well Kaleidoscope fits a book about art and zines. She comments that a zine will change over its lifespan as both its creator and audiences develop new skills and interests and these changes are reflected in the published pages. For her the operative word here is reflected as kaleidoscopes create ever changing and fluid patterns as mirrors create reflections from a constant set of components (the varied colored and shaped bits).

It occurred to me that the kaleidoscope is an excellent metaphor for my approach to life. To those on the outside, it might seem that my activities and interests are ever shifting and even lack consistence. I am one of those people who find a never ending stream of things fascinating and often wish that I could live a thousand lifetimes just so I would have a chance to explore more interests.

While fluid the patterns of my life are not random. A deeper look reveals that, like the patterns of a kaleidoscope, the patterns of my life may shift but the component parts that provide the foundation are quite consistent is it their expression that moves through phases.

The consistent components that meld into the patterns of my life include: DIY spirituality; a love of and reverence for the natural world and its cycles and seasons; food as a source of food fuel for the soul, relationships, and community as well as the body; the search for community and a sense of home; a quest for knowledge and new experiences; a belief in the value of all people; a deep desire to help make the world a better place; and a celebration of sensory experiences and beauty in all its many forms. I will be elaborating on each of these in the coming days but I should point out now that they are by no means discrete categories. This fact will quickly become evident.

Some of the ways these components currently manifest in my life are: nature photography and exploring the Northwest Indiana and Southwest Michigan; my efforts to live a simpler and more sustainable life; involvement in the local and ethicurian food movements; teaching; Goddess spirituality and Unitarian Universalism.

That will do it for the introductory information and I’ll get down to more substantive posts tomorrow. Until then . . .

Welcome to Kaleidoscope Living

Today is the first day of NaBloPoMo and the first entry in my brand new blog. I have kept a live journal for a few years and I continue to use it to stay in touch with people I know and to record my life. Lately I have wanted a venue for writing less personal and more polished/completed works.

This seemed like a good time and this seemed like a good place. My hope is that this blog will inspire me to improve my writing in the way that flickr.com has encouraged me to refine my photography skills. My plan for the first few entries is to introduce myself, explain the title of my journal, and introduce the themes I expect to emerge in my writings.

For today, I’ll start with the basic demographic details of the person behind these pages. During NaBloPoMo, I’ll celebrate my 41^st birthday and a couple of weeks before that reach a milestone in my life where my life is longer than my mothers was; she died about two weeks shy of her 41^st birthday. One of the things that has influenced my life was her death when I was 6. Over the years being a motherless daughter has played less and less of a role in my life but for approximately three decades that was a defining element of how I defined myself.

My nearly 41 years of life on the glorious planet have taken me from rural, northwest Oklahoma, to a brief stay at the home of the Sooners, to graduate school in Baton Rouge, to Mickey Mouse land in Florida, to the shadow of Ft. Bragg in North Carolina, and finally, just over a year ago, to the southern shores of Lake Michigan and a place that feels like home. To say the least it has been quite a journey.

I currently live alone as a happily (most of the time at least) single gal with a lease that forbids pets and a life path that has not included children (I have mixed feelings about that one) though it did include a now ex husband for a few years. Professionally, I spend my days teaching, doing research, and spending way too much time in meetings at a small university campus. There will be much more interesting tidbits about who I am in the coming days.

For today, I leave you with and invitation that is also the foundation of my developing personal mission statement. These words are borrowed from Rob Brezsny’s book Pronoia (which I cannot recommend highly enough).

Welcome to the moments, magic, and mirabilia* of my journey to become a “wildly disciplined, fiercely tender, ironically sincere, scrupulously curious, aggressively sensitive, blasphemously reverent, lyrically logical, lustfully compassionate master of rowdy bliss.”

__________

* mirabilia is defined on p. 175 of Pronoia as a noun that refers to “modest astonishments, friendly shocks, sweet anomalies.”