I have a spot, my sit spot and I sit and meditate or just sit and be.

I just sit and, you know, enjoy the beauty of the sunset or the warmth of the sun. Ideally, it’s somewhere that’s easy to get to, so you just can go there every day. Could be on a balcony, you know, in a city. Right. It could be on your back porch. Front porch, your yard. You know, a park can be anywhere out in nature, just embracing the mystery that is life.

You know what’s hidden and what do we see? You know, there’s so much potential right there. And you just need the right conditions, some water right. Or some love, you know, or a teacher who sees you like it’s just finding those right conditions to grow and bloom and, you know, find the beauty whether it’s in nature or in human nature. I think it helps, you know, to just be in the rhythm of nature in that way, to feel our own rhythms and just kind of accept those rhythms too.

We do introduce sit spots to kids, but I really like to do it in a more roundabout way because kids want to play right and they don’t want to be told to go sit by yourself in the trees. That doesn’t sound like fun. So we play games. Just being with kids and playing, sneaking and hiding games and nature is so fun and so joyful. I think we’re a loss society if we don’t have nature, you know? And I feel for these kids who are growing up on screens, who don’t have access and that’s why it’s so important to try to get them access, because what will our world be? You know, if everyone is disconnected from nature and we don’t believe we’re animals.

The more nature the kids have, the more they wanted to be in nature. Feels like passion to share that beauty with people and for folks, you know, to want to care about the natural world. I mean, that’s what Mountain Kids is kind of all about, right? Is we’re trying to create, you know, future citizens who care about the earth in order to save it.

I was walking back from my sit spot along this animal trail and I saw 12 different heart shaped, prickly pear cactus petals, you know, and I just hadn’t been paying that much attention, you know? So it just even going there for 17 years, it made me realize, like, there’s new things to see all the time. If you slow down enough and you pay attention, which I don’t always do, you know, and most of us don’t in our busy lives. But when I give myself that gift of slowing down and taking the time to really see, because I can look, you know, it’s just like a bunch of brown dirt, right?

When I came back in August, there had been raining a lot. And so I went up to my spot. And what’s normally just like dirt and maybe a few dry grasses was like like an explosion of green and it was gorgeous and lush. And then, you know, a week later, there were these beautiful flowers. And I stopped to like, you know, really look at the flowers and enjoy them and photograph them. And I looked at them and they were tiny. They were like this big, and they look like little orchids. There were like baby orchids. Blue- I mean, they were gorgeous and easily would just walk right by them and not even notice them right.

But that was for me a little lesson in like slowing down and looking just right there. I was like, this is so beautiful, you know? And it’s easy to miss.