Welcome back to Connect! Unite! Act! When I started writing Connect! Unite! Act! again last year, I wanted to take time to highlight the ways Daily Kos users interact with each other, build communities, and form strong relationships. During COVID, we’ve had a lot of strain put on our systems. It is easy to feel out of touch, or to miss relationships that transcend the digital.
Daily Kos groups are a great way to remind each other of things that extend beyond what we believe, but also who we are, what we enjoy, where we have fun, and all of the things that make us uniquely human. In the past, I’ve used Daily Kos to write movie reviews of films I truly enjoyed. Others have used Daily Kos to talk about food, music, or anything else that can unite them together in shared ideas. What makes life special is that we share our loves with others and we embrace the things that we love. That’s why this week, I wanted to talk about a group that can help pick up your spirits. Welcome to The Daily Bucket, a feature of Backyard Science.
The Daily Bucket is prefaced with this uniting goal:
The Daily Bucket is a regular feature of the Backyard Science group. It is a place to note any observations you have made of the world around you. Animals, weather, meteorites, climate, soil, plants, waters are all worthy additions to the Bucket. Please let us know what is going on around you in a comment. Include, as close as is comfortable for you, your location. Each note is a record that we can refer to in the future as we try to understand the patterns that are quietly unwinding around us.
We live in a beautiful, unique, profound, and sometimes baffling world. I still cannot figure out how out of my flock of backyard chickens they have all decided to ignore the coup and get so high up in a nearby tree that they are, at last check, at least 35 feet off of the ground when they sleep at night!
Thanks to the users and posters in The Daily Bucket, we get to experience the beauty that exists within their world.
There has never been a better explanation of the beauty of the work that Daily Bucket provides than a recent diary posted in June.
Phenology forms the backbone of the Daily Bucket, and, as with many scientific terms, the etymology of phenology reveals its meaning: Phaino comes from the Greek word for “to show, to bring light, to make appear,” and logos meaning “study, reasoning.” I wrote about phenology in 2016: Daily Bucket: phenology is how we take earth's pulse - you already know how.
You can learn so much about the world around you by just looking in your backyard and sharing it with your own friends here at Daily Kos. Have you seen birds recently move in? Maybe you have photos that cause you to admire the world. Trust me, I’m preparing for a fall of adding in some photos related to horses and chickens, and if I can get my garden to actually sprout anything, that will be worth noting too.
Daily Kos groups give us points of reference and archives to go back for years and find specific moments that we want to remember, to search back easily and look for animals or plants. I can dial back to 2015 and look at a daily story and say, “Dang that sea lion is beautiful” Finding majesty in something as small as a snail to the feeling of being small in the face of a moose or bison.
Ready to spend some time and look at the beauty in the world? Go for it. Check out some backyard science today! Take it from someone who grew up in a household where down the way, I knew people who kept DDT stored in cans. Appreciate what you have, and let others see it!
Don’t worry, as always, the big message still remains: do what you can to vote and help others! This video does a great job of explaining to many.