30 Days Wild: Double the Fun

 30 Days Wild: Wildlife Trust, 2021, 2022

Another year - another creative & wild challenge to do something Nature-related every day. It's what started this blog back in 2017. I decided I should do my efforts the honour of being recorded here, as well as being a good way of reviewing the past two occasions I joined in the project. So, these will be taken from my Facebook posts. Enjoy!

This first item is from 2021:

1st Day of 30 Days Wild - a month of random acts of wildness; I wanted to do a hundred things at once! Walked to Wish Park and tried to make a collage sketch using whatever I could from a magazine I'd brought to tear up (+ glue stick, which I'm Never without). I was able to put my 1st sticker in the 'passport' - good fun & a great way to connect with Nature. These collage-sketches are a recent experiment/project to try & get the hang of using a sketchbook regularly, in 10-15 minute efforts.


And this is this year, 2022's 1st Day:

1st day of #30dayswild2022!

Today is the birth-date of Poet Laureate John Masefield (1878-1967). I remember having to learn his poem 'Sea Fever' by heart when I was 11.


Looking for more information about him, I discovered how seeing one poem in a New York periodical made a huge impact on his life, and how he let the author know in a letter 10 years later:

"I had never (till that time) cared very much for poetry, but your poem impressed me deeply, and set me on fire. Since then poetry has been the one deep influence in my life, and to my love of poetry I owe all my friends and the position I now hold'.

Imagine getting a letter like that!

His own work inspired the composer John Ireland who set Sea Fever to music; and then I came across a beautiful guitar arrangement of that same poem by Michael Hogg:


In keeping with Masefield's urge, I woke up knowing: 'I must go down to the sea again/ to the lonely sea and the sky':




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