The 15 Practice Keys

Each Practice Key is a simple, repeatable way of spending time with nature. Some will call to you straight away; others will make sense later. There is no right order.

← All 15 Practice Keys

Practice Key

Imaginatively journal

Let a journal help you notice more and remember it.

A pencil sketch of a birch trunk and hanging branches in a sketchbook

A loose white chalk drawing of a small bird on black paper

A nature journal turns a single observation into something that lasts: a record you can return to and build on over months and years. Keep it imaginatively, with sketches, maps, questions, collected scraps and bits of writing as well as dated notes.

Encounters stop slipping away so quickly. Flick back through a few pages and patterns start to show: when the first swallows arrived, how a tree changed through the year, and how your own noticing has grown. It becomes a record of your relationship with a place, not just the place itself.

Try this week

Write the date, place and weather, then one thing you saw.
Draw something badly. It still counts.
End each entry with a question.

Explore 21 Imaginatively journal activity guides Back to the Practice Keys

Safety, and where the activity guides come from

Look after yourself and others. Outdoor activities carry real risks: fire, tools, water, weather, heights, plants, fungi, animals and getting lost. Every activity guide includes safety notes, but you are responsible for your own safety and for anyone in your care. Supervise children closely, get the landowner's permission, follow the Countryside Code, never eat anything you cannot identify with complete certainty, and only light fires where it is allowed and safe. If in doubt, leave it out.

With gratitude to the lineage. The Wilding Practice Keys and many of the activities in the activity guides have been adapted from the core routines of nature connection in the 8 Shields approach (Coyote Mentoring), mapped by Jon Young and shared in Coyote's Guide to Connecting with Nature (Young, Haas & McGown).

These ways of noticing and belonging are far older than any book. They grow from the knowledge of Indigenous and land-based peoples around the world, who have lived in close relationship with the land for thousands of years and have kept that knowledge alive, often in the face of great loss. Jon Young describes 8 Shields as built on patterns of nature connection he found in Indigenous cultures around the world, and on what his mentors taught him, including the teachings passed down through Tom Brown Jr. from Grandfather Stalking Wolf. Our own ancestors in these islands once knew the land in this way too.

I offer Wilding with deep respect and thanks to all of them. It does not claim or copy any culture's ceremonies or sacred practices. It is a UK way of carrying forward simple, shared human ways of paying attention, giving thanks and belonging to a place. — Jay