Nature Time: Creating A Word List

Come along for a little nature time. Your task is to generate a word list to keep as a source of nature-inspired word prompts to engage your creative spirit. Bring along a sketch pad and a pencil, find an area where you can take in the pace of nature and let the flow of words begin. Notice which words are common in your daily vocabulary and how your response to them might change once they're associated with a natural environment. For example the word surface. What images come to mind during your morning commute with the word "surface?" How about if you scuba dive? Or take a walk in the desert? What about reading a topographic map? Think about the many "identities" of words as you do this exercise, you'll greatly expand your word-list and your opportunity for creative interpretations. Watch the video below to get started.

In this short video, my 45-word list was compiled during a 20-minute desert walk. I can refer to this list as a source of ongoing prompts for a variety of creative outlets. For starters, I decided to choose the 2^nd, 4^th, 8^th, 16^th, and 32^nd words off my list as random prompts for a poetry exercise (shared at the end of the video): velvety, patina, gravel, sky, surface.

How will nature inspire you today?

Nature's Palette: Clinging Feather

Photo (feather) by Dries Knapen

Color is a powerful visual. A specific color or color combination in nature may be used as a warning, as camouflage, in mating, to attract pollinators, and more. Either way, it's purpose is to evoke a response. What colors do you respond to in the things you collect or the art you create?

The nature's palette series is a color prompt from nature itself, how will nature inspire you today?

The Salton Sea

Inspired by a previous prompt “crunchy.”

The Salton Sea
I shut my car door and walk back upon the
familiar feel of the salty, crunchy blend
of fish scales, bones and barnacles shifting
and crumbling beneath my desert-worn soles.

I stand at the sea surrounded by desert,
yet there is not a grain of sand
at this beach made of 'once living things.'
The sun-bleached remains are prolific.
It is a place poised in death, of desert-worn souls.

Mingling among smooth, mute bones
are coarse stones of frothy pumice,
an ancient colloidal foam of primordial creation,
solid and floating upon a parched and
bloodless beach, a dessicated, worn sol.
~M. Hedgecock

Save the Sea! <--learn about the Sea :)