You have now been observing your space for several weeks and have seen changes as the season has progressed. This week, you will imagine forward into the seasons you have not yet experienced.

Observation involves immediate sensory attention to your surroundings. You have been practicing such attention during the last six weeks. But attention to nature also involves the imagination in relation to the natural world. Memory, especially, is part of this imagination. When you look at a tree in winter, for instance, you imagine it clothed in the leaves of summer- because you remember other trees that you've seen in summer attire. Similarly, you may look at a rosebud and see it fully in bloom, because you have seen such flowers open and bloom in the past.

During your observation time this week, become aware of what aspects of the setting are familiar to you from your past experiences, and which ones are not. Be aware of how differently-if there is a difference-you react to more familiar and less familiar parts of the setting. Observe yourself, in other words, as you did in week two; this time, especially observe what you assume is likely to happen in the next season of this natural setting. Will the trees lose their leaves? Will the grasses grow yellow? If you were to come back in ten weeks, what would your space look like then? How do you know?

Write a short essay describing your space in the next season, a season you have not yet seen. In doing so, imagine that your eyes are like cameras. In film, the photographer varies between close-ups and distant shots. Yet often, we write without using the same kind of carefully controlled focus.

Organizing a description is often difficult. You could drift around your setting, describing a tree losing its leaves, then a bit of grass going golden, as autumn progresses. But what will hold your reader's attention? How can you give a framework to your writing that encourages your reader to follow your vision as you move through the landscape?

Imagine yourself as a filmmaker. Zoom in very close on some object; spend several sentences, even a full paragraph, describing it in detail. Length, in writing, equals attention; the longer you spend on one subject, the more deeply your reader will get to know it. Don't move off to the next subject until you have focussed deeply upon the first.

You may then want to "pan"-give a panoramic picture to the reader, listing one thing after the next at an almost dizzying speed. Many subjects covered in a brief time gives a sensation of moving quickly.

A mid-level focus in writing involves spending some time on a subject, then moving to another, linked subject. In varying among the close-ups, panoramas and mid-level focuses, you permit your reader to experience the pleasure of novelty, while spending the same amount of time on each subject can be monotonous.