Nobody else can see your rainbow
A RAINBOW is not an object hanging in the sky. It is an angle. Sunlight enters a raindrop, bends, bounces off the back and bends again on the way out, and it always leaves at roughly forty-two degrees from the line running from the sun past your head. Every drop sitting at that angle from your eye sends you colour; every other drop sends its light somewhere else entirely.
So the rainbow is drawn by a different set of raindrops for every person watching. Stand beside someone and you are each looking at your own, built from different water. Walk towards it and it retreats, because the geometry moves with you — which is the real reason nobody has ever reached the end of one.
The same shapes keep turning up at every size
Look at a bare TREE in winter: a trunk splits into limbs, each limb splits the same way into branches, each branch into twigs. Now look at a RIVER system from above. A LEAF held up to the light. A crack of lightning. The pattern is the same object repeated at smaller and smaller scales, and it is everywhere outdoors once you start looking.
There is a reason. Branching is simply the cheapest way to move something — water, sap, blood — from one place to many, and nature arrives at it again and again because it works. The same goes for spirals in a shell and a fern, and for the ragged edge of a coastline, which looks equally ragged from a plane and from a metre away.
Almost none of the living world is animals
Weigh everything alive on the planet and plants come to something like eighty per cent of it. Bacteria are the next largest slice. All animals put together — every BIRD, fish, insect and mammal — amount to under half of one per cent of living matter, which is a humbling figure for the group that does most of the talking about it.
Within that sliver, humans and our livestock now outweigh all wild mammals many times over. The FOREST, the MEADOW and the GRASS are not scenery with the interesting things living in them. They are almost the whole of it, and the animals are a thin decoration on top.
A walk through the grid
The big landscapes first — the MOUNTAIN, VALLEY, CANYON and HILL, the FOREST and DESERT, the OCEAN, LAKE, RIVER and STREAM, a WATERFALL, a BEACH and an ISLAND. Then the details that make a walk: a STONE, a blade of GRASS, a PETAL and a LEAF, a CLOUD, a SUNSET, a MEADOW and a BIRD going over.
They are not separate things. Each TREE lifts water from the soil and breathes it out, feeding the cloud that brings the rain that fills the river — the water cycle, running through every word on this list at once. A FLOWER is an advertisement aimed at insects, its colour and scent bought with energy in exchange for pollination. Nature study is mostly the habit of noticing that nothing out there is doing only one job.