Observing Nature

The Beauty of an Endless Creative Source

Before you start reading, take a few minutes to look around you.

Try to detach from concepts, capture only raw visual impressions.

Ask yourself: Where are you? What colours, shapes, textures, materials you perceive? Is there movement or stillness? Is there life growing somewhere?

You will start noticing every stimuli that surrounds you consciously.

Observing allows us to acknowledge the beauty around us. But, why is this important? Not so long ago I re-watched Ursula K. Le Guin speech at the National Book Awards in 2014. An advice that applies for today:

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.”

Beauty is needed now more than ever because what captures our attention, grows. Our reality is created day by day, by every one of us. Being conscious of this process is a powerful gift we have. And a good starting point to imagine a new reality, is to-look-around.

As a visual person, I was always paying close attention to my surroundings, a practice that I started when I was a teenager. I practiced it in different rooms, places: airports, forests, beaches, streets, different cities, countries, continents. And there is, most of the time, one common denominator that captures all of my attention - the protagonists of this article: The plants.

I am inspired by them because they are part of my family: my dad studied and works with them, my grandparents own a nursery and further away, for generations, my Italian ancestors worked with the land. In this familiar closeness to vegetable world, I recognise the main reason why I admire them:

Plants are essentially wild. Rebellious, groovy, adaptable yet strong and determined. They are growing everywhere, without asking permission, against any prediction. And that’s more than inspiring: it gives hope.

We are so used to seeing plants that we take them for granted, and it’s not so easy connecting with them anymore, as when we were kids. We eat plants, breathe plants, drink plants, walk on plants, lay under plants and most likely dream with them too.

This calling-to-observation is not only to get inspired with their perfect shades, shapes or colour combination. I firmly believe that for the greater future of the world we must connect with plants again. And to connect is not to tame, cut nor possess. Connecting means feeling, seeing, respecting, being grateful, starting an interesting dialogue.

Try it: carry a notebook, small camera, or just yourself and walk around hunting magic in the form of plants. Visit a forest, a botanical garden, a park—you can even find them in the most crowded streets. Find your sacred space and your most cherished tree—stem, flower, leaf. Google the scientific name of the plant that speaks to you, touch it, and breathe close to it. You can ask yourself how they grow, where they come from, in which context they are supposed to be born, reproduce, and expand.

Let them talk to you. Life grows everywhere and silent mysteries are placed around us constantly, we only need some curiosity to re-discover them.

Thank you for reading. See you next time 🌿

Photographies and cyanotype by Rocío Tenaglia