Happy Nature Walk Day! When there isn’t anything special to celebrate, make something mundane into something special! Today marks the calendar August 1^st, which in many ways marks a shift from summer to late summer. In both Chinese Medicine and in the Nordic Indigenous people’s way of looking at the seasons, this time of year is considered the beginning of late summer, as its own season. Here in the northern hemisphere, you can notice this through how the sun has begun to set earlier again and how fruit trees and berry bushes are beginning to ripen. While it’s not quite fall yet, and therefore not quite time to harvest yet, the apple blossoms have now turned into small carts of fruit, small apples visibly growing. Then hopefully, we’ve been able to slow down, to be more outdoors and gotten used to walking more barefoot and relish salads in the warm weather. Summer has begun turning into fall, but we still have a month left to just enjoy!

The season of late summer is connected to the natural element of Earth. In Chinese Medicine, this stands for grounding your body and harnessing the fire from the peak of summer. In life coaching terms, this can be translated into understanding your passion and living it, and now being able to and reminded to, distill it and ground it so you don’t burn out and instead can nurture your own inner flame in ways that will sustain you the months to come. Perhaps you can take your practice outside or look for inspiration to make art with. Living our passion doesn’t mean to be filled with emotion all the time, but to plan and practice regularly what lights us up, to help us keep going and at best, help us earn a living with a clear purpose and direction. What is your passion and dream? How can you turn this into a practical application of what you love? What can you do to embody your passion, little by little, step by step?

The element Earth can also be understood as the body of Earth, and our body. Maybe you need to rest differently with a siesta during late afternoon, since it might be too hot, or even too light outside, to sleep well during the night. It might be a good time to be more physically inclined with activities outdoors. A simple thing you can do, is to take regular walks in nature. A regular park will do, but if you can, strive to seek out some wild pastures, forests, lakes or beaches to walk alongside, to get closer to nature. Going for a walk, means no headphones on and minimal of talk if you’re walking together with someone. Focus instead on really noticing the nature around you. If you go the same path or trails regularly, you’ll soon be able to see all the shifts yourself, which makes you more in tune with the natural cycles and more in harmony with nature, which in turn grounds us with less anxiety and more peace. You can practice looking for different things, different days. 

One day you can focus on the greenery. Which kind of trees do you see? How does a newly formed leaf look like, and which flowers are in bloom? 

Another day you can focus on the wildlife. Anything from little ants crossing the road, to meeting a deer family or trying to differentiate the different kinds of birds there are where you live, makes for a good lesson and repetition of what we learned in school, as well as becomes a way to get to know nature more intimately. 

And some days, you might just need to walk off all your thoughts and emotions and can just focus on where you’re putting down your feet. This too is ok. Let the air fill your lungs and exhale everything that you no longer wish to carry. 

And speaking of putting down our feet, marveling at how the soil looks and feels, or the sand or the grass, connects you even deeper with nature if you can walk barefoot for a while. Children do this naturally, but we must remind ourselves again and again as adults, to let go of our minds and to get into our bodies more, so we can experience life with more presence, and ultimately more joy and wonder. Dare also to feel the ground as you lay down to tan or to rest on your picnic blanket or towel. Often, we lose ourselves in books, talks or scrolling also outside, so make it a habit to use some of your time, to just be and take it all in. The more of nature’s beauty we take in, the more we can balance our lesser wanted memories and impressions from the world. So, go for a walk!

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