Earth Week Thursday

This Earth Week I plan to post an agenda of activities for each day that grounds me in unity with the Earth. 

Agenda today:

1. Wildlife Garden

2. Rain meditation

1. Wildlife Garden: 

Every year for Earth Week I choose a new focus for learning. This year I chose the National Wildlife Federation website, "Garden for Wildlife", dedicated to "educating and empowering people to turn their own small pieces of Earth into thriving habitat for birds, bees, butterflies, and other wildlife".

It's all about re-establishing native plant communities and protecting the local watershed with sustainable gardening practices. I'll read a little everyday, and make a plan for how to improve my yard habitat this spring and summer.

Step three: Provide food for caterpillars

Why are butterflies and moths important?

Anyone who has watched a caterpillar make the dramatic change into a butterfly knows that butterflies and moths are some of the most interesting creatures on this planet. ...  But did you know that other species rely on butterflies and moths for food? Caterpillars are an essential food source for many birds. It can take over 6,000 caterpillars to raise one nest of young! By favoring lawns and ornamental exotic plants at the expense of native plants, we've eliminated the primary food source for caterpillars. This leads to fewer insects and fewer birds. 

Butterflies are also important pollinators. Pollinators help over 90 percent of the world's flowering plants create fruits and seeds. Without them, plant communities worldwide would collapse. Many people think of honey bees when they think of pollinators, but there are many different types of pollinators, including ants, bats, native bees, beetles, birds, butterflies, flies, moths, and wasps.

So, I need to get more serious about planting natives - and not just one milkweed here and a lupine there ... I want to choose a particular butterfly or two to research and plant something to attract them.

2. Rain meditation:

I've been writing about mindfulness in the garden (quiet, slow, talking to Mother Earth), but it's been so wet this spring that my challenge has been to get outside at all. It's too wet to dig, weed, or plant. 

Today I've got a meeting and errands in the morning, all of it biking around town in the rain. I decided that my best bet for earth mindfulness today is to take time when I get home to sit on the back porch, wrapped up in a blanket, and listen to the rain.

Hearing raindrops (from a warm cocoon) is soothing and meditative, and evoke's (complex) memories of my childhood. I hope that I can feel grateful for the renewal, new growth and vitality that this rain is bringing us. Perhaps I will become a pluviophile, one who loves the sound and sight of rain.