What's a Yellow Leaf Doing in My Commonplace Book?

This reflection started in Ember, the app I built for thinking with my commonplace book.

When I picture a commonplace book, I picture words. A line from a book that stopped you. A sentence you didn’t want to forget, so you wrote it down and kept coming back to it, letting it slowly shape you over time.

But for a few years now, I’ve been sneaking something else in there. Photos of nature.

If words can work on us like that, why not a leaf?

Caught on a leaf

Picture this. You’re scrolling through your commonplace book, or flipping the pages of a paper one. Quote, quote, idea, quote. Then, right in the middle of it all, a single yellow leaf from last fall.

Something happens in your brain when you see that. It’s pleasing. It’s delightful. It’s the same reason you stop and stare at a sunset. You just want to keep looking.

These aren’t professional photos. Most of mine come from my walks. They’re just things that caught my eye, and that’s the whole point. A quote catches me in my mind. A leaf catches me through my eyes. Either way, I got caught on something, so I keep it.

Learning to see

Here’s a bonus I didn’t expect. I started learning trees.

My iPhone can tell me what plant, tree, or animal is in a photo. So every time I snapped something, I learned its name. Now I can spot a hackberry by its leaf. I know a black willow by its tall, curvy branches and trunk. I can pick out an elm leaf by its ragged edges.

And it changes how you walk. You stop just passing things by. You start looking for them.

A photo is a starting point

A quote can get your thinking going. So can a photo.

A yellow leaf on the ground is a whole season changing. Sit with it. Write about it. Let your mind wander a little. Ask questions about what’s going on in the picture. Notice the tiny details you missed when you first took it.

A rabbit, a deer, a flower, a tree. Any of them can be the first line of a journal entry.

When quotes and leaves start talking

This is where it gets fun. The thoughts you have about a quote start to remind you of that deer you photographed. Or the yellow leaf brings back a quote you saved months ago.

Put them all in one big pile and it gets messy. In a good way. A photo of a tree and a quote about creativity don’t seem to belong together. But somehow they connect, and now you have a picture for the idea.

Brian Rutenberg puts it well:

For me, creativity isn’t born when everything is tidy and separate. It comes from cross-pollination, unexpected combinations, and head-on collisions between things that don’t necessarily go together.

Start where you are

You don’t need a thousand-dollar camera. The phone in your pocket is more than enough.

Next time you’re on a walk and something stops you, a leaf, a bug, the light on a tree trunk, take the picture. Then put it in your commonplace book, right next to your quotes.

Taking pictures of nature is one of the best things I’ve started doing in the last few years. It’s helped me see differently. And it’s made my commonplace book a place I actually want to go back to.

Let your words and your walks share the same pages.

P.S. If you use Ember, you can now add photos to your Commonplace Book. Bring one into a Journal reflection and it sits right there in the conversation while you write about it.

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