March 2026

My podcast programming this year is simple – love letters to nature. I invite you to join me in this collaborative project to reweave ourselves to the natural world and each other.  Share your love letters with me at fromtheoutsidellc@gmail.com and I will read your loving words to nature on my podcast. How does nature make you feel, how does she sustain you, support you, inspire you, excite you? Read your letters to nature and listen for a response. What wisdom does she offer you? As we profess our deep love and gratitude to our source of life, let us deepen our sense of place, purpose, and  belonging.

This month, I welcomed the warmer temperatures as March roared in like summer, the time to nurture my sacred strawberry patch, and the familiar sights and sounds of nature waking up as we step fully into spring.  Listen as I read my March love letter to nature. What moments of joy, love, and gratitude did nature offer you in March?

Transcript

Hi everyone! Welcome to Season 4 and Episode 37 of the From the Outside with Sarah C podcast! I am Sarah Croscutt, the host and creator of this podcast and the owner and facilitator of From the Outside, a series of plant and nature-based lessons that helps us to cultivate a deeper relationship to the natural world, ourselves, and each other. In addition, I am a published environmental writer. My work has been included in several anthologies published by Plants and Poetry Journal (www.plantsandpoetry.org) and Wild Roof Journal (www.wildroofjournal.com).  I am also the author of The Fairy Circle Way: Cultivating Connection Through Nature, a collection of my own lyrical essays, insightful narrative, inspired visual art, and simple, step-by-step practices that are designed to guide you in connecting more deeply to nature’s wisdom and yourself.  You can learn more and find links on my website, www.fromtheoutsidellc.com.

In the past two years or so, I have begun to deepen my connection to my Irish and Welsh ancestral roots. Each of us can claim indigeneity to this beautiful planet. Our earliest ancestors lived in kinship with the natural world. Their relationship with nature, their highly regarded source of life, was rooted in respect, reverence and reciprocity.  

We are living in unbelievably uncertain times. Many of us are feeling a deep sense of grief and loss – for humanity and our beloved planet. As I tend my own grief and hold the collective grief of others, I lean into nature, her comfort and wisdom. If we lean into our grief, we feel its entanglement with love. They are intertwined. Love is the wellspring from which we experience joy, gratitude, and grief.  It grows from our profound presence and awareness. Love is the most authentic and creative state of being.  In love, we recognize or “see” each other in a state of deep acknowledgement. In turn, we kindle our circle of belonging and kinship – to nature, to ourselves, and to each other.  What we love we honor and protect, deepening the authentic relationships with others that soothe and support us in times of sorrow. 

My podcast programming this season continues with my simple practice from last season – love letters to nature. I invite you to join me in this collaborative project to reweave ourselves to the natural world and each other.  Share your love letters with me at fromtheoutsidellc@gmail.com and I will read your loving words to nature on my podcast. How does nature make you feel, how does she sustain you, support you, inspire you, excite you? Read your letters to nature and listen for a response. What wisdom does she offer you? As we profess our deep love and gratitude to our source of life, let us deepen our sense of place, purpose, and belonging.

March is the month where we fully welcome spring and here in Virginia, after a very frozen winter, March came roaring in like summer! Our daytime temperatures soared from the chilly 30s to the upper 70s and 80s.  But true to Virginia spring, we had a day where we started in summer (in the 70s) and by the evening our temperature had dropped 40 degrees, and we experienced accumulating snow showers. It was wild! Plants are greening up, birds are returning, and my sweet seedlings for this year’s garden are beginning to sprout. In March, I am thankful for the sights and sounds of nature waking up!

To my beloved Nature, 

In March, 

I thank you for:

1.    The beauty and bounty of my lawn weeds of late winter and early spring. The henbit, deadnettle, speedwell, johnny jump-ups, and my granddaughter’s favorite, the dandelion, have filled my lawn with their glory! They are at their peak! A welcomed feast for early pollinators. However, my granddaughter prefers the dandelions as a silver sphere of seeds that are scattered on a single, wish-laden blow. 

2.    My strawberry patch. It is the most important patch in my garden as it has grown to become a sacred symbol of my role as a grandmother. Although I nurture it wholeheartedly through all the seasons, it is the first place in my garden that I turn my attention to in the spring.  I wrote an essay, Strawberry Love, that was published in Plants and Poetry’s most recent anthology, Ritual and Remedies. I share it with you here: 

Strawberry Love

From childhood, my connection to nature has been reverent and rich. I see her seasonal shifts – the rousing, re-awakening in spring; the robust reproduction and ripening in summer; the relinquishing and release in fall; and quiet repose and restoration in winter.  In her endless evolution, Nature embodies the beauty and benevolence that unfolds in each season.  The perpetual movement of our planet moves our own seasons forward as each yearly cycle in nature recounts the days of our own unremitting aging. In this season of my own life, I embrace the rhythm of matriarch and Gramma as I cultivate a space filled with love, joy, gratitude, and wonder where my family can feel safe, supported, and loved.  It is my patch of sweet strawberries that symbolizes the sacred space I sow for my family.

There are vast varieties of strawberry cultivars selected by growers for specific characteristics, including disease resistance, ripening date, and berry size, shape, firmness, and flavor. The new leaves of strawberry plants emerge from the center of the mother plant, reverently known as the crown. Runners are horizontal stems that spread from the mother plant and take root in the soil to produce a new plant. These new plants are lovingly referred to as daughter plants. As a gardener and a grandmother, I choose to grow strawberries in my garden for their sunny disposition and sweet, sumptuous sensation on the tongue. Their bright color and bold presence beckon my grandchildren to the garden. They scavenge through the leaves, squealing with delight upon spying one of the sweet, suspended, scarlet berries, picking only the berries that are a bright crimson color.  Their mouths and fingers drip with a red river of syrupy, strawberry sweetness. My grandchildren and I transform our harvest into tasty treats of ice cream and shortcake that we share sitting around my kitchen table. Over the past few years, my patch has proliferated, providing a bumper crop of berries each strawberry season.  

My strawberry plants were purchased at a mill market on Mother’s Day - my first Mother’s Day as a Gramma.  Like the spreading strawberry plants in my garden, my purpose and place within my growing family expands as seasons shift and time marches on.  As matriarch, I am the mother plant, rooted strongly in wisdom, life experience, and stories. With each welcomed addition to my family, a new runner is created.  A new connection of love. Like the raveled runners of my raised bed of strawberries, we weave a tangled, intergenerational space full of love and joy, gratitude and wonder, where my family can feel safe and loved. A place where vulnerability is encouraged, help is freely sought, emotions and feelings are expressed from an open, healed heart, and accountability for actions are acknowledged and accepted. 

3.  The sounds of the spring peepers. For me, they are the sound of spring – before the buzz of bees or the constant, melodious chatter of the mockingbird that come later in March. We lived in the same house for about 30 years as my children were growing up. The house had a beautiful, wooded backyard that led to a creek. My son’s birthday is in late February which in most years would coincide with the first sounds of the spring peepers. I would imagine they were singing him Happy Birthday, and I slept with my window open just to fall asleep to their sweet, high-pitched song. 

The sounds of spring spread with the return of chatty mockingbirds and bright bluebirds who keep me company as I tend to the weeds in my garden. I love the low buzz of the carpenter bees as they hover in front of you, swaying back and forth, assessing your threat level. My granddaughter will be two in June. She was visiting a couple of weeks ago and I have carpenter bees that hang out by my shed. She was completely fascinated by them as they hovered right at her eye level. This will be her first year really exploring all the critters creating the sounds in my garden!  Also for the first time, she helped her two slightly older cousins plant seeds in my garden. We planted parsley, dill, and red poppies. Before she was born and we did not know her gender, we called her poppy. So they, like the strawberries, are another important plant in my garden every year! 

4. The first sightings of small critters. Besides the usual suspects that live in soil – the first movement of worms as I weed, the uncovering of grubs, spiders, and beetle, I am grateful for the first fluttering of a butterfly that I happen to catch out of the corner of my eye – oh, welcome back tiger swallowtail!  Also while tending to the weeds, which I do by hand, I noticed a clear-winged hummingbird moth on my pink phlox. He landed right next to me. I noticed my neighbor was outdoors tending his yard. But when it came to tending his weedy species, he had his big spray container of weed killer and gloves simply walking around his yard spraying his weeds. I thought to myself that as much work as it is to tend my garden on hands and knees slowly and mindfully, I am connecting with nature with my whole being – what I see, hear, feel, and smell. I think in tending your garden mindlessly or more quickly with chemicals leaves you with a less than experience in the natural world. Perhaps less observation and therefore less connection. I am always grateful for the animals that visit me – the soil species, the butterflies, the bees, and this beautiful hummingbird moth. I greet them with a joyful and grateful heart. I wrote an essay titled Tending Our Garden where I dove a little deeper into these thoughts. I share it with you here:

Tending Our Garden

For many gardeners, the task of weeding is tedious and tiresome.  For me, the act of weeding is calming and cathartic. It soothes my soul and silences the continual confabulation in my head.  I am unsure why this task is so tranquilizing. Perhaps, it is the mockingbird perched above me on the flagpole whose constant chatter saturates my ears with sound. I wish I could understand his song, as it sometimes seems scolding and at other times, scandalous. I love his presence as he watches over me. Maybe it is the sensations of texture and temperature and the scattering of the small, subsisting life as my hands sift through the soil. I am keenly aware of the earthy aroma as I interface my body with that of the ground. With each deep inhale, the mosaic of mold spores, minerals, and other molecules migrates into my cells, mitigating my mind’s thoughts from chaos to calm.  Weeding is often an onerous task, but one that is necessary to cultivate and grow a garden that is beautiful, bountiful, and beneficial. 

In natural systems, the tending of species and populations occurs through the continuum of nature’s rhythms and cycles. In the botanical context, abscission is the shedding of various plant parts, the dropping of leaves, fruit, flowers, or seeds.  This process, the regulated and timely letting go of old growth, is necessary for new growth to occur.  Decomposition, or rot, is the mechanism by which dead, complex, organic matter is broken down into simpler compounds.  Decomposers, such as bacteria, earthworms, insects, fungus, and other invertebrates are nature’s “trash collectors,” the organisms necessary for decay, nutrient recycling, and the return of important elements and compounds to the air, soil, and water. Perturbations, like fire, flood, and disease, also assist in tending natural systems by regulating invasive species, replenishing nutrients, renewing habitat, and retaining balance.  Natural selection leads to the tending of populations over time. The individual organisms better adapted for reproduction and survival tend to produce more offspring that inherit the favorable characteristics. Over generations, these characteristics, or traits, increase in frequency, resulting in a population that is more suited for survival in its environment. 

In nature, cultivation or casualty is continuous and controlled through natural cycles, catastrophes, chemical reactions, and changes in characteristics. As humans, tending our garden requires a consistent, conscientious effort.  Maintaining our own intrinsic landscape can be as boring and burdensome as abating the unwanted growth in our outdoor garden space but is necessary to cultivate our most beautiful and bountiful life. As humans, we must receive the process, rather than resist it. 

As a year-round gardener, I lean into the rhythms and cycles of nature as I create, cultivate, and clean out my garden space.  It is a thoughtful process with variations season to season and year to year. For me, summer is the most strenuous of seasons.  The heat and humidity are stifling. By July, my garden is unruly and untidy as I been unable to keep up with the tending. The plant varieties that I purposefully preserve are obscured by the overgrown collection of less meaningful species. Some days, I feel frazzled, frustrated, and fed-up. Nonetheless, I remain wholly committed to cultivating a conscious, chemical-free space that nourishes my body and the bodies of the other non-human visitors to my garden. There are no shortcuts. I embrace the acute attentiveness I must give to each strewn sector, carefully selecting the species I want to cultivate and culling those that create chaos.

Like growing our garden, tending our soul requires planning, persistence, and presence. There are no shortcuts. With our genetic gifts of consciousness, creative thought, and rich emotions, we must weed through our ego, fear, illusion, and a myriad of muddled feelings -sadness, loneliness, anger, resentment, insignificance, and a loss of control and connectedness.  Suppressing our internal disharmony with excessive substance use, material consumption, and other external remedies is not practical in purging the undesirable elements of our life. Instead, we must lean into and listen to our own voice, learn our individual strengths and values, and linger in the self-love and wisdom of our own heart to lead us to our deep joy and purpose. As a gardener, our work is never done. Year to year and season to season, our abiding attention to our authenticity liberates us from what no longer serves us, nourishes our relationship to self, and grows our most meaningful life. 

Announcements and Upcoming Events

As I mentioned last month, my book, The Fairy Circle Way: Cultivating Connection Through Nature is now available through Amazon in Kindle, paperback and hardcover formats, Barnes and Noble, and most book retailers as it is available for global retail distribution through IngramSpark. If you have been listening to this podcast from the beginning of Season 1, you are familiar with my fairy circle model as a practical guide to cultivate a purposeful and intentional relationship with nature. My book is a collection of my own lyrical essays, inspired visual art, insightful narrative, and simple, step-by-step, daily practices designed to guide readers into a deeper relationship with nature and themselves, reconnecting them to their sense of belonging, their truest self, and the wisdom of the natural world. If you choose to purchase the book and feel led, please write a five-star review on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads, etc. so others may find it. 

If you are in the Richmond, VA area: 

The Wisdom from the Wild series continues to meet the 1st Sunday of the month at 10:00 am at Powhatan State Park, Powhatan, VA. We will meet at the Equestrian parking lot. Each month has a theme that follows the rhythms and cycles of nature. April’s theme is impermanence, or ephemerality. We will explore the sensational, but short-lived, seasonal, ephemeral forest wildflowers. In April, the first Sunday of the month, 4/5/26, happened to be Easter Sunday, so I have changed our program date to 4/12/26, THIS Sunday. You can visit the Events tab on my website or the Powhatan State Park website (https://www.dcr.virginia.gov/state-parks/powhatan) for details. 

Wisdom from the Wild Description

Whether you’re a veteran outdoor type or only beginning to discover your connection to the natural world, Wisdom from the Wild will lead you on wonder-filled journey to recovering your sense of belonging and finding your truest self, rooted in the rhythms and raptures of nature. Through a variety of mindful observations and reflections synchronized with the seasons, we will examine the ecology of natural ecosystems, explore our own ecological body, and practice integrating nature’s wisdom into our daily life. The program series is free of charge, but parking fees ($5) apply.

Here is the description for April’s program, Impermanence:

On our wander this month, we will explore woodland, ephemeral wildflowers, a variety of small plants that carpet the forest floor with their colorful blooms early in spring.  These sweet, short-lived forest beauties can teach us a lot about impermanence and the continual ebb and flow of life – joy, sadness, perturbation, resilience, grief, love, and loss.

Thank you so much for listening! I encourage you to venture out – to your backyard, a local park, a green space near where you work and spend a few minutes purposefully and intentionally connecting with nature.  Use your whole body – really integrate into your being what you see, smell, hear, and feel.  Spend time with those you love or sit in silence, solitude, and stillness. They are important states of being in nurturing our nature connections. Acknowledge nature’s wisdom and role in your life. Nature shows us how beautiful and transformative growth can be! Remember, we are all connected to the source of life and each other! With that said, you can connect with me through my website www.fromtheoutsidellc.com, or on Instagram @sarahc_outside. Links to podcast, website, publications, webinars, and all the things can be found there! Visit my website for upcoming classes in the local community, latest publications, and details on workshops available for educational settings, professional development, recovery programs, conferences, or other groups. As always, please feel free to reach out! 

 Until next time, take care!