Love this. One of the biggest misconceptions I see in creation stewardship convo is restricting it to rural spaces. "City" is not an antonym of "nature".
https://twitter.com/wqed/status/1346456176326799364
We can easily romanticize engagement w/ creation & imagine that being a "naturalist" means living a rural lifestyle. But it's much more about perspective than location.
.@n_d_anderson & I both grew up in the country & it shaped us in ways we didn't recognize for a long time. But even when we've lived in less than rural spaces, we shared a particular disposition or awareness of natural world.
That's something of what we're hoping to communicate in #TurningofDays. It's more of a way of being in the world than being in a specific location.
This is part of genius behind Annie Dillard's rendering of Tinker Creek in _Pilgrim at Tinker Creek_ (which actually flows thru subdivisions, towns, & past a factory.) Tinker Creek is not the pristine wilderness that you might imagine from the book.
(We live just miles from Tinker Creek & walk along it regularly.)
What Dillard does, however, is draw our eyes to the things that we *should* be paying attention to but often miss. She knows what to look at & what to ignore. She leaves out a whole lot of things in order to focus our attention on particular things.
Giving attention to the natural world does not mean you sell up & move to the country. It doesn't mean growing all your own food or foraging for it. You might make these choices or you might not. There are limits on all of us.
Giving attention simply means giving attention--opening your eyes to the natural world around you & honoring its goodness. It means recognizing your place in it. It's a reorientation to the spaces you already exist in.
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