I'm a Nature Journal Teacher/ Nature Connection Mentor on a path of relearning how to be a human in reciprocal relationship with the interconnected web of life! Come along and geek out about all our nonhuman kin with me! :) πΈπ π¦π»π¦π¦πππ’π·πΈππππ¦π¦¨π¦π±π³ β(After you subscribe, make sure to go to your email to confirm your subscription! Otherwise you won't actually get my letters. π)
Learning As We Go
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Nature Connection with Rebecca: Letters of Wonder from My Ecosystem to Yours π September 4, 02026 π Dear friends, Recently I was reading some of the oldest blog posts from 2009 from a writer who started a blog anonymously as a way to track her progress in learning a skill. What I find inspiring is that she learned as she went along, and she did her learning in public. Now she has written books and is well-known. The things she teaches other people are based on what she learned from her own experience, and what she continues to learn. I felt inspired to do that with my writing too, especially since I have just rebooted this newsletter. (Ok if you're curious what blog it was, it was A Slob Comes Clean by Dana White. I live with my parents, and lately we've been finding her books How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind and Decluttering at the Speed of Life to be very useful. I think I'm already pretty tidy, but it's exciting for me to build these skills more so that maybe someday if I have my own place, I'll be ready!) I want to help people learn about and connect to nature. But I don't have all the answers, not even close. Sometimes people seem to think that because I went to ESF, I must know everything about nature. I do not! I do have a lot of expertise to share from my education and from the past few years of being a nature journal teacher, but I am always learning. We all are! There is so much to learn about in nature. All we can do is learn a little bit every day. The more we pay attention and observe the world around us, the more we learn. Especially when it comes to the deeper questions that pull at me, like how do we as a species heal our relationship with the natural world? That's a much bigger question than I or any one person can answer. It has to be something we all figure out together, one day at a time, one nature observation at a time. And with a topic like this that's about developing a sense of place and connection to the land, it intersects with (or really, is founded on) indigenous cultures and wisdom, so antiracism and decolonization are crucial to this work. I'm not an expert in those fields either, although I do my best to be an Ally; to always keep learning and being open-minded to correcting my views, so that I can honor indigenous knowledge without appropriating, and make my community a space where people different from me feel welcome. So that's what's on my mind this week. What's your next step to learn a little more about the world around you, and all the plants and creatures and human people in it? How can you be a little more brave and do your learning in front of (and together with) other people as you go along? Have a great weekend! -Rebecca P.S. Good news! I was able to recover access to my email from my personal domain! If you don't know what that means, I've been hearing from several of you that you've been finding my emails in your Spam folder. This should hopefully mean that's less likely to happen now. π€ Going forward, you will see my letters come from hello@rebeccarolnick.com instead of forestschooltoyou@gmail.com, which is an old address I've been using as a placeholder these past few weeks. If you missed any of my recent letters because they went to spam, you can read them here:
Rebecca Rolnick Writer, Naturalist, Educator βwww.rebeccarolnick.comβ βhttps://www.instagram.com/habitat_restoryation/β _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Land Acknowledgement: This letter is sent from Syracuse NY, which is in the unceded ancestral lands of the Onondaga Nation of the Haudeonsaunee Confederacy. β¬β¬π²β¬β¬ _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ This is a 100% human-created newsletter. No AI was used in the outlining, writing, or editing of this letter. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
Nature Connection with Rebecca
I'm a Nature Journal Teacher/ Nature Connection Mentor on a path of relearning how to be a human in reciprocal relationship with the interconnected web of life! Come along and geek out about all our nonhuman kin with me! :) πΈπ π¦π»π¦π¦πππ’π·πΈππππ¦π¦¨π¦π±π³ β(After you subscribe, make sure to go to your email to confirm your subscription! Otherwise you won't actually get my letters. π)
Nature Connection with Rebecca: Letters of Wonder from My Ecosystem to Yours π October 18, 02026 π First-quarter Moon Dear friends, Here's one specific way that connecting to nature can also help you connect better to other people. (You can also click here to watch the video version of this letter). One exercise you can do to help you deepen your sensory experience of nature is a Sense Meditation. When you go outside, listen towards your left. Listen towards your right. Listen to the quietest...
Nature Connection with Rebecca: Letters of Wonder from My Ecosystem to Yours π October 10, 02026 π New Moon Dear friends, Today I have a Book Review to share with you. Lonesome for Wilderness: Tracking and Trailing in Forest, Desert, or Your Own Back Yard by Linda Jo Hunter A while ago I got curious about animal tracking, so I ordered a bunch of books on the topic from the library. Most of them were field guides, stuffed full of technical information and images of tracks, sorted by species....
Nature Connection with Rebecca: Letters of Wonder from My Ecosystem to Yours π October 3, 02026 πLast Quarter Moon Dear friends, For a while now, I've been really into Nature Journaling with pen. Unlike with pencil, of course, you can't erase. I think this helps me to be a little looser with my sketches and less perfectionist. But... sketches are still a way of recording information. What do you do if you make a "mistake" and the drawing (and therefore, the information) is inaccurate? It's OK...