Planting Seeds Exploring Your Feelings in Nature
In Planting Seeds: Exploring Your Feelings in Nature / Plantando Semillas: Explorando Tus Sentimientos en la Naturaleza, students can explore nature spaces in Lake County while also unpacking many questions about our various feelings, including: What is a feeling? Where do we feel them? How do we learn to explain our feelings to others?
These are big questions that can be tricky to answer at first, but learning how to understand and process your feelings can open so many new doors!
Brushwood Center works to connect people to nature, creativity, and each other. We work with other community groups and leaders to help solve problems using the power of nature and creativity. Since 2020, Brushwood Center’s It’s a W.I.N. team has created an annual nature activity and coloring book for youth and families in partnership with local artists, educators, and environmentalists.
This year, we created Planting Seeds to take students on a journey through local nature spaces in Lake County while exploring what it means to have feelings and how to manage them. Learning how to identify, express, and process feelings is crucial to childhood development, and can lead to better grades, improved problem-solving and conflict resolution skills, and improved mental health outcomes. Plus, readers get to learn about some cool local nature spaces on the way! Spending time outside has been proven to help people of all ages calm their nervous systems and better regulate their complicated feelings, and this book can help you find new places to explore, rest, and recharge.
Learn more about the work that went into Planting Seeds, how you can go deeper into the conversation on feelings, and learn ways to get involved in community action by exploring the resources below.
HEAR FROM THE ARTIST BEHIND PLANTING SEEDS
This coloring book would never be possible without our amazing artist, Royce Galindo! Read a short interview with Royce below to learn more about his process, his background, and what inspires him!
Tell us a bit about yourself, your process, and how you create.
Piyali! I spent most of my childhood in Waukegan, where I learned that I never wanted to live outside the Great Lakes region—ever! My deep love for water led me to pursue pursue a degree in Natural Resources on the south shore of Lake Superior. First and foremost, I consider myself an artist. I’ve been drawing with graphite since my hands were very tiny and uncoordinated.
I love to illustrate, design, write, bead, carve, throw [clay], photograph, record, edit, teach, and tell. There’s many things in my life to draw inspiration from when it comes to kick-starting my creative process. People and places (cities and architecture especially) make my heart sing! Sometimes there’s too much I’d like to create, so I very much enjoy when I am approached with hopes and dreams of collaboration. My greatest artistic challenge has been finding a way to combine my two dearest passions—art and environmental science—and I am thankful to have this extraordinary opportunity to work with Brushwood to create something that uniquely combines art, environmental education, and healing guidance in one book.
What do you find hopeful about this year’s Backpack and activity book focus of helping children cope with big feelings around climate change?
I believe we adults need to work overtime to ensure children of every community have what they need to live through the consequences of climate change. This includes intellectual and emotional tools to help them understand what’s happening in the atmosphere, who’s causing it, and how to improve unsafe situations. There’s no avoiding it—we’ll all witness natural disasters and experience loss (many are already experiencing it), and we cannot afford to let our children or ourselves fall into perpetual despair. It’s crucial for young humans to learn healthy ways to manage grief and stress; I hope that providing this book, filled with stories and activities of emotional support, will help the children of Lake County take a step forward in learning to cope with what’s to come. I hope, too, that it will instill in them a strong commitment to their environment.
How have you been personally impacted by access to nature and the arts in Lake County?
My childhood would have been empty without the parks, preserves, and beaches here. I know back then my parents must have felt as thankful as I do now for these natural areas: thankful for their financial accessibility, as well as for the enrichment they offered their children. Returning as an adult with a big brain full of new information, I am astounded by what I didn’t realize was here this whole time! Nowadays I spend a lot of time celebrating my rediscovering these natural spaces, especially their birds and medicinal plants.
Which Lake County, IL sites do you have a personal connection to? Which green and blue spaces are special to you?
My favorite places to be as a child, in order, were: in the forest or on the playground at Bowen Park, on a paddle boat at Independence Grove, at the defunct Powerhouse Museum on the lakefront, on the hill at Old School Forest Preserve, and in the shade at the tiny pond in the tiny park within the industrial park where my dad worked. This pond was where I saw my first Mute Swan and Turkey Vulture (still one of my favorite birds).
Tell us a bit about healing land – what do projects like the Waukegan dunes restoration mean to you?
I used to feel hopeless about the futures of ecosystems across the earth in the face of climate change, until I came to work for the Bad River Natural Resources Department in northern Wisconsin. There, I worked alongside Tribal members who live and breathe restoration and conservation—they must, because on the reservation, brimming with precious rivers and wetlands spilling into Lake Superior, there is too much to lose. The Tribe does everything, from invasive species removal to taking multinational corporations to the State Supreme Court over oil pipelines, and all of it comes back to healing the land, healing the self, and interrupting patterns of intergenerational trauma. It’s astonishing and inspiring what Bad River has accomplished for the sake of the planet, and I encourage everyone to research their battles and victories, and support the Tribe in any way that you can.
EXPLORE THE NATURE SPACES IN PLANTING SEEDS
Planting Seeds features different nature spots in Lake County that are open to the public to explore. Use this map to check out the different sites and how close they may be to your community! Click on the icon in the upper left corner of the map to see a full list of the sites, and click on the different location tags to learn more about things to do at each spot.
EJ ISSUES IN LAKE COUNTY:
View our Health, Equity, and Nature Accelerator Kit below, to learn more and get involved in environmental justice work in Lake County!
MORE ABOUT BRUSHWOOD CENTER’S WORK:
Nature Explorer Backpacks / Mochilas de Explorador
Planting Seeds: Exploring Your Feelings in Nature will be distributed in Summer 2024 with the help of local community partners through Brushwood Center’s annual Nature Explorer Backpack / Mochilas de Explorador Project. Now in its fifth year, the Nature Explorer Backpack Project works to connect families in Lake County with fun, art and nature resources, and new ways to connect to the more-than-human natural world!
Health, Equity, & Nature Accelerator
Planting Seeds is also inspired by the ongoing work of our Health Equity and Nature Accelerator. Launched in 2022, Brushwood Center’s Health, Equity, and Nature Accelerator was created to meet the community demand to address inequities and injustices at the intersection of health, climate, and nature. The Accelerator activates equitable nature-based solutions through community and healthcare partnerships.The Accelerator’s newest report, Health, Equity, and Nature: A Changing Climate in Lake County, IL, is a tool for community members, organizations, and decision-makers to implement equitable, nature-based policy decisions to improve our communities’ health and wellbeing
