NATURE DATES
Simple practices for re-membering our relationship with nature
Nature Dates is a field guide for re-membering our relationship with nature. It features simple prompts, reflections, and activities that can be done alone or together, inviting people to slow down, pay attention, and cultivate a deeper relationship with the living world. Whether it's spending thirty minutes watching an ant, going on a weekly nature date, listening to the soundscape of a forest, or noticing flowers growing through cracks in the pavement, each practice offers a small way to reconnect with nature in everyday life.
Alongside these activities, the field guide explores how nature can inspire the way we design, create, and relate. Drawing lessons from forests, fungi, rivers, birds, and seasons, it encourages us to see nature not simply as a source of aesthetic inspiration, but as a teacher of relationships, resilience, and ways of living together.
This project is created in collaboration with Soil to Grow and DesignShifts
Go on a date with nature
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Organize a plant cutting exchange
Arrange for a plant-cutting exchange with your friends (or strangers). How it works: everyone brings a few plant cuttings from their homes to a shared gathering. Like any exchange, the cuttings are traded amongst each other.
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Listen to a Nature Podcast
Go to a spot where you can listen to nature. Preferably where there are fewer cars and more birds. Lay, stand, or sit in a comfortable position. Close your eyes if it is safe for you to do so, and start listening. Notice the different sounds you can hear. From the wind, to the birds, streams, people… Notice how the sounds work together.
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Feel the tactile experience of new growth in spring
Especially pine trees, get a small bit of extension on their edges that is a lighter green and significantly softer. Touch it, enjoy the feeling of new life. Try to imagine how your own growth is often tender and soft and seems a bit tacked on to everything else you were before, but that is the beauty of it and it will be incorporated soon
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Every other week, we share a new date idea for you to participate in.
Nature Dates is a collaboration between DesignShifts and Soil to Grow — an organization that addresses domination culture towards nature and each other founded by Athanasios Christopoulos.