Welcome to this issue of Stumped by Nature, where we notice nature lurking just beyond our screens, curate a list of outside-y events in Austin, and build community with other folks in the thick of the startup ecosystem.
In this week’s issue:
🪵 1000 Hours Outside
🌤️ Upcoming outdoors events
❄️ Seasonal event deluge
Let’s dig in!
-Nicole
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PPS I’ve compiled a Gift Guide for the Outdoors-Curious. It’s saturated with affiliate links so we can all benefit from our mutual great taste. You can find it here.
NATURE SPOTLIGHT
Math quiz:
What is 1000 divided by 365?
The answer: how many hours each day a community of folks aims to spend outside.
Also: 2.74.
Today we’re looking into the 1000 Hours Outside challenge.
Why? Because I just cruised over the finish line for my version of the challenge this year, and why have a nature newsletter if you can’t brag about accomplishing nature goals.
(My other New Year’s resolution was to wear more green. Guess what? Nailed that one too.)
What Is 1000 Hours Outside?
The idea is exactly what it sounds like: spend 1000 hours (or more) a year outside, ideally off screens.
The challenge began in 2011 when a mother had the universal experience of overwhelm while parenting young children. Ginny Yurich set out to counterbalance an indoors-heavy modern life that wasn’t working. It started with a let’s-just-see-what-happens experiment to reclaim some mental health space for herself and her children.
And here we are, in 2025, talking about it.
Why Would You Do Such a Thing?
Have you drunk the sunlight exposure first thing Kool-Aid yet? It’s delicious, man.
I’m in an echo chamber of books like The Comfort Crisis, whose big takeaway is that modern life is wildly indoors, despite hundreds of thousands of years evolving as outside creatures.
What I’ve come to believe:
Time outside changes our attention, regulation, and perception.
Nature engages a soft fascination—rustling leaves, bird song, moving water, shifting light. It holds attention without demanding it, and attention is permitted to widen.
Brains in nature have a chance to rattle around ideas, loosen writing, and untangle problems. Attention recovers and recharges.
Outside, there’s sense of depth that’s impossible even with twelve-foot ceilings. A world of contrasts: near and far. Moving and still. Loud and quiet.
Over time patterns emerge. You notice absence—of wind, of birds. And you notice novelty: a new voice in the bird song, a plant now in bloom or going to seed.
Outside lets you use your senses as intended.
Pink Evening Primrose. Just look at them! The ones not yet all the way open? Gah!
This is in direct contrast to a couch-strewn doomscroll: forced micro-decisions, a flood of emotion-producing content, constant feedback from an internet world way more vast than Dunbar’s number ever intended our connection-geared bodies to hold.
Everything is optimized for quick dopamine hits.
Everything is trying to sell you something. (Including this newsletter! Did you see the outdoors-tangential gift list? The event I’m hosting in January?)
So, to recap, time outside rests attention instead of taxing it, settles the nervous system, and sharpens perception by reintroducing depth and scale.
Which is a long-winded way of saying it feels a lot better than scrolling the internet.
I moved to Austin to avoid the cold, so January looked like this.
Challenge Logistics
For naturally outside people, three hours a day outside might feel shrugworthy.
But I was a fully certified inside person. Climate control all the way. We’re talking indoor restaurant seating in April at known patio restaurants.
With my pre-challenge baseline so incredibly low, my life was extremely ripe for disruption.
Loose guidelines I set for myself with this outside goal:
get outside more
celebrate the small habit shifts
That’s it. Entirely arbitrary. As simple as possible.
With progress, not perfection in mind, I clocked 800 hours my first year tracking. This. Was. Huge.
That incremental shift laid the foundation for a lifestyle increasingly alert to opportunities to step outside, created a cadence for unlearning the indoors, and launched a phase of rewilding myself.
I mean What? Really? How?
Tallying Time
This was year four of me attempting the challenge, which means I now have over 4000 hours of anecdotal data to over-explain how I determine what counts.
Some examples:
popping out to tend to the chickens doesn’t count if it’s just a feed/egg gather/expressing gratitude for their cloacal efforts. But if it shifts into refilling water/mucking/a backyard girl hang, I’ll consider clocking it
walking kids into school doesn’t count if it’s a straight out-and-back, but if it becomes a 30 minute catch-up with my pal in the parking lot while a mockingbird trills from the power line, I’ll clock it
camping overnight in a hammock is a yes, which may be cheating. But when there’s a middle-of-the-night opossum crawling down my anchor tree, a skunk sniffing at my mosquito net, and birdsong announcing first light, I’m taking creative liberty with the hour count
chatting on a covered patio with my book club buddies, passing around a basket of pickle chips—absolutely counts
As a rule of thumb, outdoors is viable from 55 degrees to 105 degrees, with plenty of wiggle room on either end for cloud cover, whiffs of breeze, proximity to water, activity level, and that day’s quantity of determination.
(Side note: my low-temp threshold comes from pandemic-era Heartsong Music outdoor classes, the life-changing baby/parent class combo here in Austin. Deeply jealous of anyone with kids still in this age range.)
This chicken-tending visit counted. Maybe even double.
Enthusiastic Outside Yeses:
when serving a meal I know my kid(s) will dump all over the floor while they’re developing plate/gravity/spatial awareness
when my kids and I are on different pages about TV consumption
when my kids are attempting to recreate the story of Cain and Abel
when my kid(s) have big emotions overflowing the living room and need a more expansive space to let ‘er rip
when I’ve hit an emotional wall and the hammock is just as good a place as any to curl into the fetal position
when bird noises are especially enthusiastic
when something new is blooming in the ditches along my commute
when working from home with internal Zooms, tethered to the back porch with an extension cord and dual screens
when the element of surprise in my house feels lower than the element of surprise outside
when I’m not sure I’m on pace for the year hour count, so I prod ATX Writing Club to write under a Live Oak on a 55-degree morning, and toss an EOY Big Bend trip as outside hours safeguards
My daughter’s most vivid beach trip memory was sitting on a jellyfish. Yikes.
Am I over-selling this?
Can you believe this is the greatly-reduced word count draft?
Additional Pros to the Outside Challenge:
Front porch life. With the caveat that my neighborhood has excellent people, being outside means actually seeing them and getting the scoop on who’s chomping at the bit for a weekly park playdate, who has bees, when the classroom gingerbread party is going down at the elementary school, how many skunks are eating out of the cat food bowl on my neighbor’s porch, etc. Thrilling.
Curiosity and awe. Really, does it get better?
A potential trajectory: Birds as phase one. Then plants—trees first, as the most stationary, then some common landscaping plants, then swaths of the neighborhood greenbelt. Eventually: delight and jaw-dropping awe at realizing senna has pea-like pods, that you do know the name of the sumac shifting into autumn colors, which yaupon is male, and how quickly accessible a seething heat toward nandina is, that berry-clustered, invasive, toxic beauty.
If you tell people you like nature, sometimes you get invited to go into nature.
But What About the Mosquitoes
Those jerks.
As a card carrying member of the population who both attracts mosquitoes AND has a large local reaction to bites, mosquitoes were once multi-day-ruiners.
But!
Prevention!
Cooler weather camping uniform: thick, tall socks, joggers, sweatshirt
Peak mosquito season + unbearable heat: chemical lotion. Less harmful than West Nile? TBD.
If my defenses fall short, I use this Bug Bite Healer to solder the bite into submission. This absolutely changed the game for my outside life, and I’m eternally grateful to the brilliant couple who put this on my radar. Yes, it’s as if you’re giving yourself a cigarette burn, but it’s for a good cause—the itch and swelling almost entirely disappear for me. Absolute miracle tool.
If my defenses fall short + I don’t have my bug bite healer, I entirely abandon the outdoors ship. Roughly 3 hours outside a day leaves room for 21 hours inside, and sometimes the choice is extremely clear.
Do you have to track time to benefit?
No, it’s arguably a free country.
But externalizing the processes of getting outside can be helpful for noticing the subtle internal changes.
Even during busy seasons (especially during busy seasons), we’ve gotta get some fresh air.
Might as well gamify it.
Maybe it’ll change your life.
WINTER SOLSTICE
December 21
Thanks to the Earth tilting to its farthest angle from the sun, we’ll have our shortest day and longest night of the year on December 21. Near the poles, the night seems endless, and it’s weeks of the sun lingering below the horizon.
And here we are in Austin, with much of the world frozen and in hibernation, while I sit on a sunny patio typing about it.
Still, the season carries its own invitation to enter a reflective phase. A call to rest and recharge. Time to reach out to people who’ve impacted you, to check in, to tend quieter threads.
Solstice Celebrations (according to The Wheel of the Year) :
In Ancient Syria, a festival called Sol Invictus was later adopted by the Romans. Big ol’ party to celebrate the Sun god returning, undefeated.
In Ancient Iran, the longest night was thought to be unlucky, with dark forces at work. Families stayed awake through the night to keep watch. Modern Yalda shifts the focus to warmth and enjoyment, with red foods like pomegranates and persimmons symbolizing the coming rosy dawn. There’s also a tradition of Bibliomancy—opening to a random page of your favorite poetry book, reading the poem, and interpreting which messages it might hold. The traditional pick is the Persian poet, Hafez, but you do you.
And our contemporary midwinter feasts, Hanukkah and Christmas.
Oh what fun.
Cosmic Saltillo, as captured at Close the Loop #1!
UPCOMING EVENTS
🗓️ December 20: Holidaze Mini Market at Eden House Botanicals
🗓️ December 20:Winter Solstice Guided Hike at McKinney Falls
🗓️ December 21: Solstice Reset at Festival Beach Food Forest: On the itinerary: yoga, sound bathing, tarot, and a clothing/book swap
🗓️ December 26 and 27: Stargazing at Reimers Observatory
🗓️ December 26 Zilker Botanical Gardens Free Day
🗓️ December 27: Concert in the Dark: Radiohead: Thanks for putting this on my radar, Uke!
🗓️ Through January 3: A Christmas Carol at Zach: Indoors, BUT on a great year, it can make me cry three times. When’s the last time you cried in public?
🗓️ Through February 1: Fortlandia
SEASONAL FLAIR
❄️ Peppermint Parkway at COTA
❄️ Luminations at LBJ Wildflower Center
LOCAL FARMERS’ MARKETS
👩🌾 Arboretum Food & Artisan Market Saturdays 11-3
👩🌾 Barton Creek Farmers Market Saturdays 9am-1pm
👩🌾 Lakeline Farmers Market Saturdays 9am-1pm
👩🌾 SFC Farmers’ Market Downtown Saturdays 9am-1pm
👩🌾 SFC Farmers’ Market Sunset Valley Saturdays 9am-1pm
👩🌾 Texas Farmers’ Market at Bell Saturdays 9am-1pm
👩🌾 Texas Farmers’ Market at Mueller Sundays 10am-2pm
HOMEWORK
Go outside. What’s the best that could happen?
Don’t forget your sunscreen.
Bonus points: Consider joining me in a 1000 Hours Outside challenge next year?
That’s all for this week!
In the meantime, I hope you see the light of day.
-Nicole
OPTIONAL SIDE QUESTS
🪵 What’s this like for you? Email with your perspective.
🪵 Who should I collaborate with? Email with your recs!
🪵 Is this newsletter not your vibe? Forward it to your enemies to make them suffer too.
💰It’s safe to assume there are affiliate links, and I’ll monetarily benefit from any purchases you make. Hooray, capitalism! So far, this newsletter has generated $1.45 of cold hard cash. 💸