When I am wearing my Naturalist Educator hat at Maine Outdoor School and I meet a group of students for the first time, I tell them, “whenever you see me, that means we’ll be outside, having fun, and learning about nature together.” While we won’t be outside together this morning, I want to offer noticing in nature as a spiritual practice to carry with you, because not only is noticing uplifting, but also noticing shapes what we care about, what we choose to protect, and what we can believe is possible.
So I’d like to start by inviting you to think about what signs in nature right now tell you it’s spring. Close your eyes and imagine walking out of your home and noticing. This weekend, what did you hear? See? Smell? Feel? Which of those observations were signs of spring? (you can open your eyes)
I keep a journal of these seasonal observations to note the dates throughout the years of what happens in nature when. This is the practice of “phenology,” the timing of seasonal events in nature. And if you have ever paid attention to when your local crocuses or forsythias bloom, or when the robins return to your yard, you’re a phenologist too.
During this week of the year, I have a recorded history of noticing great blue herons and northern flickers returning; spring peepers, eastern phoebes, hermit thrushes, and winter wrens singing; yellow-bellied sapsuckers drumming; kingfishers chattering along rivers; tattered mourning cloak butterflies emerging from behind their tree bark walls where they spent winter; red maples flowering; and salamander eggs in vernal pools.
Phenology is a noticing practice. Tracking seasonal changes is a way of relating to the concept of change itself.
It’s an exciting time of year. We call spring and fall the “shoulder seasons” as if they’re not the main events of the year—that they’re simply thresholds from one extreme to another. As if even in describing the gradual cycles of the seasons, we humans still want to put things in a black or white box when all our seasons are figuratively (and sometimes literally) so gray.
Even in the depths of a cold early February night when the trees might be popping from a deep freeze, there are still signs of what’s next. The Passamaquoddy call the February full moon the “spruce tip moon,” or “the time of year when spruce tips fall.” You may have noticed the tips of those sharp evergreen branches scattered on the snow and wondered why. It’s our neighbor the red squirrel that’s to blame. Come February, the seeds and mushrooms they so often eat are not as abundant so they turn to the swelling buds of spruce trees which they nip off and drop to the ground. Even in that hungry phase of winter, the trees know spring is coming and are moving energy to those buds so they’ll be ready to push out new growth once daylight increases in length and warmth.
Noticing what’s going on in nature from day to day highlights that every moment is a threshold to possibility. The spruce tree produces sugars through the process of photosynthesis during warm and sunny seasons, stores those sugars for the cold and dark seasons, then uses them again to push out new growth once the warm sun returns and repeat. This process also produces oxygen and transforms the energy from the sun into something that can fill a hungry squirrel’s belly. Why produce and store and use energy if not for the possibility that new growth is next?
As we know well, the spring equinox does not suddenly bring flowers and warm rain and green back to the landscape. The red squirrels don’t wake up one day and decide to stop eating spruce buds and start looking for mushrooms. Change does not happen all at once. Change is a result of a long, often hidden, accumulation of energy, which I would argue shows that every season is a shoulder season to the next. That overwhelming chorus of spring birdsong we will soon hear yields the quieter moments in high summer when parents and young birds endeavor to stay hidden from possible predators. That quiet time in the summer forest boasts the most lush, green growth all around us with plants doing their best to produce and store energy for the possibility of the next season when they can’t.
Noticing helps us realize that change is gradual, not sudden. Every moment is a threshold to possibility, not because anything can happen but because something already is. As humans are part of nature, we can be reminded that human change works the same way: always happening gradually.
As Rachel Carson said, “Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
This is why noticing matters spiritually. It trains us to trust slow change, to stay present inside uncertainty, and to recognize that possibility is already unfolding—even when we can’t yet see the outcome.
For us humans, it may sometimes seem like change does happen all at once. You might get some unexpected news that changes the trajectory of what you expected your life to be. Maybe you do wake up one day and decide to quit your job or a relationship that isn’t serving you. Sudden disturbances like this happen in the forest as well—a wildfire, a flood, an earthquake. Their impacts all feel sudden and jarring.
But these changes are still results of long, often hidden accumulations of energy, whether that’s from tectonic plates shifting, a long drought, or a list of little symptoms that one day make up a diagnosis. Change only feels sudden when we’re not practiced in noticing subtlety.
Noticing opens us to possibility. If we don’t notice when the hermit thrush stops singing, we can’t grieve its loss in the fall or celebrate its return in the spring.
Noticing creates relationship, which yields a sense of responsibility, and inspires action.
My first job after college was teaching at an outdoor school in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. On day one, I was given the staff t-shirt, which was adorned with California wildlife tracks and scat on the front and a quote from Baba Dioum on the back: “In the end, we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand and we will understand only what we are taught.”
As a Naturalist Educator there, I wasn’t teaching 6th-graders to love the manzanita trees and Steller’s jays; I was teaching them to notice, to observe. A wonderful way of doing this is trying to capture those observations on paper using pictures, words, and numbers and three specific prompts. This practice can also be done as a meditation that builds presence, curiosity, and connection with the natural world.
So let’s try it together. Start by focusing on one thing in nature that you can observe right now or you’ve observed at your home. Fill in the blank in your mind, first: I notice….focus on one sense at a time. Second, fill in the blank: I wonder. And third, fill in the blank: It reminds me of.
This three-part practice is ideal for building more noticing into your life. It engages our senses, which also helps regulate our emotions, encourages curiosity and critical thinking, and helps us make connections between specific things in the natural world and our own lived experiences. Love and stewardship of the world around us follows.
This practice of noticing doesn’t stop with birds and buds—it scales up. What we notice together shapes the world we build together. Collective noticing has already shaped what was once impossible.
Earth Day, coming up on April 22nd, is a kind of human phenological event. It’s a recurring threshold we have chosen to mark since 1970. While our negativity bias can make it so easy to focus on what we haven’t done to make the world a kinder, healthier place for all living things, or get us hung up on the day to day decisions by other people that feel like giant leaps backwards, it can be helpful to zoom out and notice what has changed since Earth Day 1970.
Before 1970, there were no laws or regulations to protect our environment. What people noticed—polluted air, rivers on fire, disappearing species like the bald eagle—became impossible to ignore.
In 1970, millions of Americans participated in demonstrations across the US in support of environmental protection, making the Earth Day rallies of 1970 the sixth largest single day protest in US history.
It worked. In the spring of 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin created Earth Day in order to put these environmental issues on the national stage. What followed was the implementation of the Clean Air and Water Acts, the Environmental Protection Agency itself, the Endangered Species Act, and so much more.
The people who made the first Earth Day possible, who stewarded these widely held attitudes about the importance of clean air and water and the benefits of biodiversity, these were people who saw the possibility of a brighter future and didn’t just hope for it. They recognized that while change is constant, action is needed to ensure those changes are the ones we want.
In 1980, ten years after the first Earth Day, Gaylord Nelson said, “So long as the human species inhabits the Earth, proper management of its resources will be the most fundamental issue we face. Our very survival will depend upon whether or not we are able to preserve, protect and defend our environment… We disregard the needs of our ecosystem at our mortal peril. That was the great lesson of Earth Day. It must never be forgotten.”
Collective noticing, not only of the wellbeing of the environment that surrounds us and how it supports our wellbeing, but also of the progress we’ve made even when it seems impossible, is what offers a hopeful roadmap to the future we want.
Possibility is defined as “a thing that may happen.” For example, it may rain. That’s always a possibility in the spring. But possibility isn’t abstract; it lives in observable things. Are there clouds in the sky? Are they dark and gray? Then yes, it’s possible that it may rain soon. Can we control whether it rains soon? No, but we can notice the signs of coming rain and be prepared with a raincoat. Then the challenging weather suddenly isn’t so challenging.
Is it possible that some of the wonderful things that changed to support our ecosystem’s health since Earth Day 1970 could be compromised? Of course it is; we can notice the signs. But we have a lot more control over policy changes, for example, than we do the weather. When we focus on noticing what wonderful things have happened and why, we can see the proof that possibility itself has changed things.
As Jane Goodall said, “One individual cannot possibly make a difference, alone. It is individual efforts, collectively, that makes a noticeable difference—all the difference in the world!”
Nothing we do exists in isolation. Even when we’re alone in the kitchen making breakfast and tossing those coffee grounds into the compost, there are others doing the same thing—turning one beverage’s waste product into something that will feed decomposers, and later, plants in the soil. Sure, just a couple tablespoons of coffee grounds transitioning to the compost pile in one day doesn’t make a massive difference, but those individual efforts collectively sure do.
In the spring forest, nothing happens in isolation either. Most of our warblers return once the insects emerge which can match the warm-up of rivers and ponds after ice out and the flowering of trees and shrubs. The shadbush flowers when the shad come up the rivers to spawn. Or is it the other way around? Were the shad named for the shadbush or the shadbush named for the shad? Regardless, noticing these phenological relationships highlights what is possible together that isn’t possible alone.
If we each individually submit data about the phenological changes we notice in our own backyards to places like iNaturalist or eBird, the collective data paints a much clearer picture for scientists to notice bigger trends.
For example, something humans have noticed in recent years as our climate warms is something called phenological mismatch—that some seasonal events aren’t aligning with each other as they did historically. Monarch butterfly migration dates, for example, aren’t as aligned with the right life cycle stages of the milkweed they rely upon. This new phenological variability paints an uncertain future.
But the future is always uncertain, isn’t it? A foretold future has no possibilities in it. An uncertain future is where agency lives. Uncertainty is not the absence of hope, it’s the presence of responsibility.
So as spring unfolds—slowly, unevenly, sometimes punctuated by unwelcome snow storms—I hope we remember that possibility doesn’t arrive all at once. It arrives quietly, the way spruce buds swell before they open, or the way birds arrive individually before the forest fills with sound.
Noticing is how we learn what is already underway. It’s how we find our place inside change rather than feeling at its mercy. And when we practice noticing together—when we pay attention to what’s returning, what’s struggling, and what’s asking for care—we strengthen not just our knowledge and sense of place, but our hope.
Noticing is not passive. It is a spiritual practice that teaches us how to belong to change rather than fear it—and how to act with care inside it.
This Earth Day, and in the days after, may we keep practicing noticing: in our yards, our communities, our policies, and our own lives. Because what we notice, we come to love. What we love, we choose to protect. And what we protect together—that’s where possibility takes root.