Awareness - Knowing Your Neighbors
Recognizing your place within an ecosystem starts with noticing the other beings in its web, and your local park is a great place to start.
Learning the names of particular trees, flowers, birds, and bugs fosters recognition of their individuality.
Observing patterns of behavior over daily and seasonal changes builds an understanding of how everything fits together in a web of relationships.
Maps and data can illuminate these patterns by weaving our own observations with others’ in other places.
​Visit the Awareness page for maps of Horton Park and resources to learn about who inhabits your local park.
Appreciation - Place-Based Art
Place-based art is rooted in a particular place and time, often seeking to capture the essence of a sight, sound, scent, or sensation.
Such art can take many forms–written word, photography, drawing or painting, or music.
At the heart of Moments in the Park are short prose poems inspired by my walks in Horton Park, as well as bike rides to work, playing with my kids, working in the garden, and other time outdoors.
The act of co-creating a piece of art forms a bond between the artist and the beings or phenomena that inspired them.
Art like Moments in the Park expresses the creator’s appreciation of a place and its inhabitants and, hopefully, inspires appreciation in the reader or viewer.
Visit the Appreciation page for the prose poems, stories behind and around them, and other art.
Action - Communities Working Toward Regeneration
Awareness and appreciation of your ecosystem encourages a sense of connection and caring.
In any ecosystem, each being has particular gifts to contribute to the community. The community thrives when each of its members finds their role.
Our communities are facing disruption from climate chaos, systemic injustices, and an economic system dependent on infinite growth by exploiting people and planet. 
The challenges are interrelated and call for a complete reimagining of how we live together.
It all seems overwhelming, but we don’t have to do it alone. Actually, we can’t do it alone. 
The good news is, many people have already started imagining and building regenerative communities. Somebody hoping someone with your particular gifts will find them.
Visit the Action page to explore organizations working toward regenerative communities.
In the works! An online, interactive course to guide you through getting to know your local park and ecosystem, creating place-based art, and finding your niche in building regenerative communities. Interested? Let me know what you'd like to see in such a course at momentsinthepark@gmail.com.