Seeds for New Year's Visions

January always seems to wear two cloaks here in Southern California: On calendars and thermometers, it’s mid-winter- a time when our bodies want to stay curled up in bed on toe-numbing dark mornings. In my garden, however a different story is unfolding. Yesterday, as I carried my one-year-old, Serene, around the Learning Yard, we counted tiny new buds on our apple and peach trees. The tiny green fists of pear and fig leaf clusters are punching themselves out of their branches.

With the ever-so-slightly quickening pace of human and plant life, it’s taking a bit more effort to keep my pace slow and inward for awhile longer in order to embrace mid-winter traditions of reflection, visioning, and renewal that are shared by many ancestral cultures around the world. In that spirit, we’re sharing are a couple of fun family-friendly visioning and planning projects for the garden along with a bit more about some earth-based traditions that take place at this time of year:

Make a Garden Map

Laying out your garden with a seed packet collage is an easy way to include your kids in the fun of planning what goes in the garden, which adds to the satisfaction and magic of seeing the plants bloom later in the year. This family-friendly winter project has infinite variations- for a simple version with instructions and materials, check out our journal page: Make a Collage Garden Plan.

Make Seed Tape

Plants grow best with the right spacing, and sometimes it is hard - especially for young hands- to plant small seeds - like carrots and lettuce - one-by-one. In this indoor project, we make seed tape using newspaper and flour paste. When warmer weather rolls around, all you have to do is unroll your seed tape and plant it in the soil. You’ll need some small seeds like carrots or lettuce, newspaper, flour and water. To read step-by-step directions, you can read more on our journal page: Making Seed Tape.

The “Human” in Human Nature

Photo: Anna Elledge

An aspect of my own vision for The Human Nature Center that I’ve sat with more deeply this winter is that along with sharing nature-connective skills and activities for families to enjoy at home, I feel particularly compelled at this time in the world to learn and share more about traditions of earth-tending from all over the world- historic, contemporary, and those in formation.

There are incredible people in our world who are working, often unseen, to keep alive the roots and shoots of good relationships with the Earth, and I feel that the more we see ourselves as part of a beautiful tapestry of human creativity, handmade prayers, and heart-felt acts of love for the land, the more we are bolstered in our own efforts and imaginings for what’s possible.

Another reason why I’m passionate about sharing these stories with you is that the well-being of people and of land are interconnected. While that’s true everywhere, it’s most directly visible where people continue to live on land that they have tended, listened to, and developed wisdom with for generations- or even millennia. When land is taken, it’s people are lost. When people are taken from their land, the world loses the unique voice and gifts that it’s people have coaxed with such beauty from it. As we develop our own nature-based relationships on a daily basis, one of the best things we can do is to learn from historic cultures of earth care and wisdom as well as to support those that are living today.

Earth - Centered New Year Traditions

Gifts to the Hawai’ian god Lono during the Hawai’ian winter new year festival of Makahiki at Bellows Air Force Station in Waimanalo, Hawaii, 2010. Image source: Wikipedia

This time of mid-winter has been celebrated by many agricultural and pre-agricultural societies around the world as one of rest, reflection and gratitude for what’s come to pass, visioning and prayer for what’s yet-to-come, and renewal of self and community. In our most recent blog post, we take a look at mid-winter traditions in ancient Germany and among farmers of the Mohawk nation, in native Hawai’i, and those that I’ve received in my teaching bundle as a nature educator. Read on here.

However you celebrate the New Year, we wish you a beautiful month that hopefully includes slowness, moments outside or near a window to soak in the late-morning sun, and the blessings of gentle winter rains on your gardens.

With love for the Earth and all people,
Meg Handler, family and the Staff of The Human Nature Center