The Wheel Turns: Gratitude for a Good Run

Posted on December 1, 2022 by partnersinplace
Anne drawing

The wheel has turned, as all wheels tend to do. As my gradual retirement becomes more complete, I am closing the Partners in Place, LLC website. At the same time, access to the Wheels of Time and Place toolkit, now out of print, is moving here. You may download the instruction booklet and digital files of all circular journal templates at no cost. Please use them to support your continuous explorations of time and place.

As I look back into the origins of the Wheels of Time and Place toolkit, I experience a flood of recollections of the joys and sorrows of my naïve adventure into self-publishing. I am reminded of the support that held me up from many corners of my community. With gratitude, I share these photographs from the all-hands-on-deck toolkit stuffing party at Cricket Design Works in Madison, WI in 2008. It takes a village to do many things, including raising a first-time publisher! Many thanks to those pictured here (paid only in pizza) and to others not pictured as well (including and not limited to Dave, Betty, and A.B.). And, of course, to designer Cricket Redman herself!

Top row: Joan and Marian (left); Joan and Marian, and Jim (top); John, Cricket, and Sue

Middle row: Kathy (left); Nikki and Alex (middle); the “innards” ready to stuff

Bottom row: Robin and Rebecca (left); Ian (right)

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The Heart of Home #3: Introducing the Watershed Wheel

Posted on March 6, 2012 by partnersinplace

Continued from The Heart of Home #1 and #2: Spatial Scale and Time Scale

About twelve years ago, a group of like-minded friends gathered by my fireside to reflect upon what it means to live in this place we call home in Dane County, Wisconsin, USA. We chose to think of the Yahara Watershed as our spatial (geographic) scale, and the series of seasonal events that occur in a typical year as the temporal (time) scale. We put a map of the watershed in the center of a large Wheel of the Year, with units of time of going around the outside rim, much like a clock, but using months instead of hours.  We then went round our own circle, each speaking of the defining moments in the natural world and in the lives of people enjoying it throughout the months of a typical year. The artist among us sketched the details onto the Yahara Watershed Wheel that you see here.

This was the beginning of an approach that I now call wheel-keeping that eventually grew into the Wheels of Time and Place a toolkit and set of instructions for making your own circular journal or mandala, using whatever spatial and temporal scales you choose – such as a year, lunar month, day, lifetime, and do-your-own blank shown below.

Of course, you don’t have to keep a journal to explore and appreciate your home place on earth and the home place in your heart. What are the dimensions of home in this moment? What marks of time’s passing do you observe?  The more playful you are with these questions, the more you may feel a part of your home place and committed to co-creating its well-being with others in your community. Welcome home!

Adapted from Cycles of Seasons, Sense of Place by Anne Forbes in The Yahara Watershed Journal, Vol. 2, 1997. Used with permission.

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The Heart of Home #2: Scales of Time

Posted on February 21, 2012 by partnersinplace

Continued from The Heart of Home #1: Spatial (Geographic) Scale

As I continue to notice my backyard on this day of winter sunshine, I easily find evidence of past and future seasons. Dried stalks of prairie plants push through the snow and hold up their variety of remnant flowers, evidence of the lush growing time of summer. The cut stalks of asparagus plants top off the compost pile, reminders of the last days of fall cleanup and the long-lived roots that lie in wait under the frozen soil. I notice that I am now allowing time to pass in my mind’s eye. Season passes into season and year into year – past, present, and future.

Here I am noticing temporal scale – the varying amounts of time for each living being to complete a life cycle from birth to death or for a landscape to change from one kind of ecosystem to another. In the years since European settlement, my backyard has changed from native wetland, to coal ash dump for a new city, to construction site for homes, to yard and garbage burial site, to lawn and vegetable garden, and now to a mix of plants that are native and non-native, edible and ornamental, living in a patchwork of my own design, modeled after the designs of nature. To an ecologist, temporal scale can vary from microseconds for a biochemical reaction to thousands of years for the development of an ecosystem. For geologic and evolutionary changes, temporal scale spans billions of years. For tracking our human lives, we often think of the days and months that make up a single year and grow into a lifetime.

photo by brewbrooks

Take a moment to come into the heart space of your own center and the center of your home place and ask:

How do you and your home place dance through time? How do you observe and celebrate daily, lunar, and seasonal cycles?

What is the current season of your lifetime? In the words of poet Mary Oliver, “tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Adapted from Cycles of Seasons, Sense of Place by Anne Forbes in The Yahara Watershed Journal, Vol. 2, 1997. Used with permission.

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The Heart of Home #1: Spatial (Geographic) Scale

Posted on February 13, 2012 by partnersinplace

Today, I find myself sitting in shirtsleeves on my back steps where the rays of a strong noontime sun warm my skin and dance across undulating snowdrifts that cloak my garden. Tomorrow, we expect a blizzard. In this moment, I am able to bask with closed eyes in what is for me the center of my neighborhood. I have a strong sense of belonging here. It is where I nurture what I think of as the first circle of my life, my own health and that of my family, and where I practice what seems like unbounded stewardship for my yard, which is such a tiny piece of the planet.

From this spot, I cast a series of mental loops out across the landscape. Each one encompasses more area, a larger portion of land and community surrounding me. I wonder to myself, “What are the boundaries of what I call home?” As my sense of home place becomes larger, I include all of nearby Lake Wingra and its watershed, including the walking routes, trees, and open areas that are part of my extended family. As my boundary grows, I include places in the city that I frequent, the good friends and colleagues that draw me there, and the habitats that are home to the great diversity of plants and animals of our region, and it’s not long before my awareness extends into the farthest reaches of the Yahara Watershed, nested with the larger the Mississippi River watershed, and beyond. I push myself to cast my mental loops out to match the distances that my personal travels have taken me – eventually South American rainforests and Irish stone circles fall briefly within my definition of home. I marvel that I am able to contract and expand my image of home place to satisfy the curiosities of the moment.

I am relating here to spatial scale – the geographic area of a community or ecosystem and therefore, the boundaries we might use to think about home place. In the mind of an ecologist, spatial scale can range from a tiny site such as the microscopic world on the underside of a leaf on the forest floor, to an entire forest, to the larger regional landscape that includes the forest. The biosphere (i.e, the living planet Earth) might be thought of as maximum spatial scale, at least for life as we know it.

Take a moment to come into the heart space of your own center and the center of your home place. What are the dimensions of home place in this moment? What is the size and shape of the place on Earth where you are able to easily connect with plants, animals, and your human community?

Adapted from Cycles of Seasons, Sense of Place by Anne Forbes of Partners in Place in The Yahara Watershed Journal, Vol. 2, 1997. Used with permission. Watch for The Heart of Home #2 (Scales of Time) and #3 (Introducing the Watershed Wheel) coming soon.

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