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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"How Are You Doing?"
An exercise in reading a response that isn't spoken.
Go outside, find an organism, and ask it how it's doing. Stay quiet afterward and try to interpret the answer, how it seems to want to grow, what it seems to need, what it seems to be avoiding. It's an intuitive skill that develops the more you practice it.
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A Song of Nature
A way of playing music with your surroundings instead of over them.
Add your voice, your hands, or an instrument to the outdoor soundscape around you. Play alongside the birds, the wind, and the water, and let their unpredictability shape what you make.
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A Story for an Organism
An invitation to imagine a whole inner life for something wild.
Pick an organism and imagine its life, what its childhood felt like, which memories mattered to it, which connections shaped it. It doesn't need to be accurate; let yourself have fun with it.
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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.