There’s a Pine Needle on My Kitchen Table
By Bill Buseman
Broadcast on 9.24 & 9.27.2025
Observations from Bill’s nature journal.
Listen:
There is a pine needle on my kitchen table. How odd, how out of place it seemed. How did it get here, indoors, so far from outdoors? So far from the closest pine tree? Yet here it is.
Of course, it must have fallen off a ponderosa pine into my journal and taken the trip back home with me. I got my journal out to write and I am sure it fell out to remind me of something.
Everything we do has a reason. If we track back what we did, where we were, we will know why most things happen.
Here I now sit, six weeks past my first ink in my nature journal, looking at the results of what I have been doing. I am not a writer. I am not a painter. I don’t think I am an artist of any kind. Yet in front of me, next to a piece of life, my journal lies buried under two boxes of pens, pencils in various shades of grey, and random colors from a box of colored pencils. The lids on the boxes are held on tight by black hair bands. Those have been there since the time, about four weeks ago, that I lost a pencil in a creek I was communing with. I was trying to draw water and the creek said no. We challenged each other and the stream won but I laughed anyway. There are no winners. There are no losers. There are lessons. Thus, the black hair bands. Haven’t lost a pen or pencil since.
This is what nature journaling does. It takes you on a journey—a journey to you. I love it because there are no rules. I showed some of my early drawings to my Master Naturalist instructors Christine and Kelly—they looked like, I am sure, a first-grader’s attempt at writing the letter “A.” “What should I do?” I asked, wanting to know how to make my journal look more like the montage that I was seeing. Their answer was, “Keep drawing.”
Simple. Effective. Those two words kept me going. I started anew by sitting in the grass and drawing a tree. Not the whole tree, not the whole forest. One little piece of the tree. There was layered bark. All of the bark fit together like a puzzle with a small space between each piece. Then I noticed that the trees were not brown and green. The bark was grey, red, black, orange and covering some of it was an electric yellow moss. There were some bubble-shaped mushrooms growing out of the bark—greyish-white affairs that did not have gills. I looked up. There against the sky was a deep green batch of needles. So, there is green. I’m learning.
On this one day, in this one moment, I learned more about trees, nature, and myself than I have in my entire life. I must put this in my journal, I thought. I must tell the world how amazing journaling is. Come on people, get excited! I was.
I sat under the tree for a while looking for someone, something to share my excitement with. Just me and a few ravens and a forest of trees and plants. They all know the story. I stood up to continue my saunter through the wonderland. A slight breeze came through the forest. A pine needle fell from way above and landed in my journal as I was closing it up.
There is a pine needle on my kitchen table. There is a pine needle in my soul. If I could only put that on paper.
Every week since 1991, Field Notes has inquired about Montana’s natural history. Field Notes are written by naturalists, students, and listeners about the puzzle-tree bark, eagle talons, woolly aphids, and giant puffballs of Western, Central and Southwestern Montana and aired weekly on Montana Public Radio.
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