4 Birth Months That Are Artsy and Outdoorsy
Some people pack a sketchbook before they remember to pack lunch. Others spend a whole walk admiring a color they want to use at home. Making things and getting outside belong to the same lovely impulse: wanting a little more contact with the world. For a bit of birthday fun, imagine these four months planning their ideal afternoon.
March
March, you can go out for a walk and return with the first line of a poem you weren't planning to write. Something about the light on the water or the sound of rain moving through leaves gives a feeling its missing words. You linger beside a pond, then spend the way home quietly rearranging a sentence. The piece you make later may barely mention the place that inspired it. It holds the mood of being there: dreamy, a little wistful, open to whatever comes next. This is why you like having time outside with nobody hurrying you along. You were nearly home, but now you've stopped at a bench to write something down.
May
Your version of a perfect afternoon probably requires washing your hands more than once, May. You might spend the morning in a garden and the afternoon at a pottery wheel, happily trading one kind of mess for another. You like materials you can get to know by handling them. A plant needs repotting; a bowl needs a little more work around the rim. There is pleasure in staying with something while it takes shape, even when the finished result differs from what you had in mind.
And your garden has a way of following you indoors. The flowers you grew suggest colors for a painting. A curling leaf becomes a pattern you want to draw. Eventually, you're giving someone a handmade vase with something from your own flower bed tucked inside. You get to say, with considerable satisfaction, that you made both parts of the gift.
October
The same stretch of woodland can keep you entertained for years. October, you notice when the light reaches a familiar tree differently, or when a patch of moss looks almost impossibly bright after rain. You may bring a camera, but you spend plenty of time simply looking. Getting the photograph means crouching, changing your angle, waiting for a breeze to move a branch. You enjoy that small collaboration with a place you can't arrange to suit yourself. Sometimes the picture you wanted never happens. Instead, you notice a reflection in a puddle beside your shoe and spend ten delighted minutes trying to catch it. When someone asks to see your photos afterward, you'll explain why you kept the one everyone else nearly scrolled past.
December
December, the little drawing in your travel notebook may be wildly out of proportion. The hill is enormous. The tent looks capable of housing one very small mouse. You love it anyway, because you remember sitting there trying to draw while a friend made you laugh. Your creative side enjoys being taken somewhere it has never been before, and your outdoorsy side is usually happy to handle the arrangements.
An unfamiliar trail gives you things to wonder about, sketch, and tell stories about later. You want to get a feel for the place with your whole body: the climb, the wind, the welcome moment when you finally sit down. Making something along the way lets you stay with an experience a little longer. By the end of the trip, the notebook has bent corners, a few ridiculous drawings, and a sandwich stain nobody is willing to take responsibility for.