March 31

Nature nurtures creativity:

In one of my books I'm researching for my nature video challenge, I came across this list of famous people who were inspired by nature. So if you're feeling blocked, go for a walk!

"Joan of Arc first heard her calling, at age thirteen, “toward the hour of noon, in summer, in my father’s garden.” Jane Goodall, at two years of age, slept with earthworms under her pillow. (Don’t try this at home.) John Muir described “reveling in the wonderful wildness” around his boyhood home in Wisconsin. Samuel Langhorne Clemens held down an adult job as a printer at fourteen, but when his working day ended at three in the afternoon, he headed to the river to swim or fish or navigate a “borrowed” boat. One can imagine that it was there, as he dreamed of becoming a pirate or a trapper or scout, that he became “Mark Twain.” The poet T. S. Eliot, who grew up alongside the Mississippi River, wrote, “I feel that there is something in having passed one’s childhood beside the big river which is incommunicable to those who have not.” And the imagination of biophilia’s patron, E. O. Wilson (whose boyhood nickname was “Snake”), was ignited while exploring the “woods and swamps in a languorous mood . . . [forming] the habit of quietude and concentration.”"

-The Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder

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