Write a short description of what you see in your selected place. Use as many of your senses as you can to do so.

Spend some time in the selection of your place to observe, because you will be spending a fair amount of time in it over the next quarter. You want a relatively small area to observe. Even a backyard is too large; a quarter of an average-sized city backyard is plenty. Your goal in the next quarter is not to wander about in your space but to observe it, and to observe it changing. If your attention is always flitting off from one part of the space to another, you will not observe as fully as if you select a smaller space.

Use all your senses to observe. Smell. Touch. Look. Listen. You may even want to taste (but don't put anything you suspect of being potentially poisonous into your mouth!). Pretend you are a child. Open yourself up to see everything.

Also pay attention to scale. Don't just look at the larger plants, rocks, and other occupants of your space. Look at the small things as well. You can change your perspective at will; you can even put your head onto the ground to see what else you can see.

Spend at least fifteen minutes taking an inventory of what your space looks like. This is your baseline. The changes that occur in your space will be compared with this original observation.

Writing is a multi-stage process. Don't think that you will create the best possible description of your place by writing in a single draft. Write freely in your first draft, and then revise until you have achieved a smooth and expressive draft. It may take four, six, even ten drafts before you are satisfied.

In writing freely, let yourself write much more than you need. You will, in this piece, be permitted to write as much as you need to establish your baseline. But let yourself write as much as you need to contain all that you saw and heard and experienced. As you write, don't be concerned with tone, organization, style, or even grammar. You can correct it later.

Like a sketch, these pieces of writing will in general be easier to complete if you write them sooner, rather than later. Go right inside and do the writing, rather than putting it off for later in the day or even later in the week. Because part of the class intention is to hone your observational skills, writing immediately will mean you're not relying on memory but on recent observation.

After you have written down everything you can remember of your experience, let it rest awhile. A day, even part of a week, is fine; a few hours are okay. Then consider how best to organize the material so that a reader follows you through your space. Any organizational principle can work-just make sure there is one. You may follow your eye as it moves from right to left, or left to right, in your space. You may move from top to bottom in the space. You may create categories: plants, animals, birds, rocks. You may describe your awareness as the time passed. When you have determined and organizing principle, rearrange your impressions and observations to fit it.

You will probably not, at this point, know the names of what you saw, or the scientific words that describe them. For this reason, it is especially important to describe carefully.

As you are writing, concentrate on what you experienced, not the feelings or memories or dreams that were evoked. These are natural experiences when we are outdoors, and will be explored in later exercises. You may, however, certainly write using the first person pronoun "I." The point is not to write dryly and "scientifically," but to capture as vividly as you can the setting you observed.