Blogs

            In my earlier web paper, Hurricane Sandy, the Rotunda, and Thomas Berry, I talked about how an unexpected power outage provided me with an experiential form of environmental education. Standing inside the pitch-black Haverford College’s KINSC rotunda made me analyze the college courses proposed by author Thomas Berry for educating future generations to be more mindful of humanity’s role in the environment. By examining several of Berry’s prescribed courses, I was able to put my real world experience inside the rotunda into an educational context, thereby growing as an ecological-minded student. But while I certainly felt that Berry’s lessons were helpful for environmental education, I concluded that his classroom based and structured courses were not effective enough. Rather, I advocated that a true environmental education should incorporate more real world and unplanned experiences so that students can be thrust into the natural surroundings and realize their importance to society.

            My hometown recently released a magazine called "Grown." This is a town in which the class differences are extremely visible and most of the people that live here year-round are not really part of the higher ones, but most everything caters to the wealthy tourists and summer home owners. This magazine, apparently, caters to them, too. It discussed summer programs for high school students at sea, fundraisers for health food stores and local eating, and information about how to make a summer house more "green." No options were given to the many residents of the town that cannot afford these things. The wealthier members of Western society are given in forms like this easy ways to be environmentally-friendly and connect to the Earth, while the less wealthy are not. The less wealthy that do not happen to live in tourist towns with rich plant life do not even have the opportunity to.

Dear 360'ers--
Barb, Jody and I would like to invite you to have dinner with us, to celebrate the conclusion of our
shared work together this semester (not to mention plotting some on-going connections and elaborations….?).

We're proposing that we do this @ 5 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 17, @ my place in center city.

We're going to order in, so please tell us what you'd like to (or cannot/will not) eat.

Getting yourself there would involve taking the R5 to Market East, then walking south
four blocks to 903 Clinton, 2R (it's just above 9th Street, between Pine and Spruce).

Let us know if you'd like to--and can!--make it?
 
Hopefully, and happily,
Anne (for us 3)

I was excited to visit my site this week. Since my last visit left me so amazed, I thought that, surely, it would be fun to visit the cloisters as well. I was wrong.

There was nothing new in the cloisters. Just the same ol' grass, beaten down by weather and numerous people trodding down on it, looking as it did the week before last. How disappointing.

I was wondering whether I made a wrong decision not changing my site; after all, it does not provide much nature-fueled stimulation most of the time, and the other person that chose the same site, Claire (CMJ), changed her site. Then, however, I thought about my process of decision-making: I am not one of those people that take forever and a day to decide about things. I make my decions fast and rarely regret them. I have learned to think fast on my feet and evalute options quickly. I don't dwell on past decions much (there are certain exceptions though), so I decided not to dwell on this particular one either. I trust myself that I made the right decision.

Eva is a character whose life seems filled with silences, particularly her own. Often she will refuse to answer, refuse to explain. While I do not intend to take away her agency or voice through my interpretation of Eva’s Man, I wanted to focus particularly on what I see as inherited silences; silences that seem to have been passed down from Eva’s mother, Marie, to Eva. This mother-daughter transition represents a circle of life. This also emphasizes other circles that are present within the book and the relationships portrayed. The style of writing also works to emphasize “cycles.”

Throughout the novel Gayl Jones continually makes use of fragmented story telling, sometimes leaving little or no transition between each story. It becomes impossible to untangle each fragment and the reader is forced to see the way in which nothing is unrelated. Jones refusal to write cohesively is both inviting and uninviting. She mirrors Eva’s own contradictory emotions of desire and refusal. She gives the reader the pieces of the story but refuses to order them or explain them. Readers have to choose how to negotiate reading Eva’s Man. They either have to book at arms length or they can choose to seek clarity; choose intimacy with Eva. In a way, Eva treats the reader like she treats the men and women in her life. We are both a refused and desired audience.

So when I was revising the last paper, Anne suggested me to read this book, “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide” by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDuun, but I could not borrow the book from the library so I watched the DVD instead (both are available at Canaday.) For those who are interested in gender equity and feminism movement, this is definitely something worth watching. It is a touching documentary. A passionate call to arms against our era’s most pervasive human rights violation - the oppression of women and girls in the developing world. It was painful to watch. A vivid picture of women in different parts of the world as victims of culture, tradition, poverty, religion and most importantly mankind. It communicates its points with heartbreaking stories of women who have gone through tremendous cruelty just because they are simply women. It captures the mesmerizing eyes of hopelessness of these women. But there are also the heroes and the heroines who are engaging in changes, the women who passionately fight for their own rights and others who dedicate their life to offer a helping hand to the oppressed women. I was struck to realize that, all the heroes and the heroines that are changing the world are actually ordinary people living an ordinary life just like me and many other people. I was mesmerized by the question “What can I do??” because the documentary is so touching and motivating…

Here goes, another eventless site sit. The nature in the cloisters (or lack thereof) will be the same as last week - what could I possibly write about this time?

These were my thoughts as I was walking to the cloisters that Saturday afternoon. The sun was setting and I was going to miss it, since it sets behind TGH, and the wonderful was going to be blocked. Sigh.

However, when I walked into the cloisters, I stoped dead. I was mesmerized, completely hypnotized, wonderstruck. The last of the sun's rays filtered through the tall windows of Thomas Great Hall, coloring the grass a million different shades of all the colors of the palette of visible light and nature. For the first time, I saw a whole new dimension to the otherwise boring flora that is enclosed within the cloisters - it seemed happy, almost playful. The light (alas, what was left of it for that day) shone proudly and strongly, beautifying the natural landscape.

It was nature - biology, physics, chemistry, ecology, environmental science, and all their glory - that reminded me exactly how wonderful our planet is. It also reminded me why I have such an appreciation for the sciences: because they explain it all, the wonders of nature. And to me, that makes nature more tangible, the environment a little closer to me, more understandable. On that note, I take my hat off and salute all the science majors out there; you are doing what I do not have the energy or the will to do, but it is still something I have an immense appreciation for.

1. A continue of former class discussion--what is the unspoken hunger?

I felt like I hadn't explained my points clearly enough in class. In my opinion, the unspoken hunger is a hunger for vitality (I didn't say this word in class because I forgot how to say it in English). When we eat the "green fleshy" vegetable, we are consuming not only its body, but also its "soul", its "life". Its bright green color and fleshy appearance are symbols for its vitality, and they are the important factors that make us "risking the blood of our tongues repeatedly".

2. "Life appeared fluid"

In "Water Songs", Terry Templest Williams wrote about the fluidity of life. The genes and life patterns of living organisms can be fluid, because they changes as the surrounding environment changes; The environment itself can be fluid, because it could be shaped by all organisms living in it together; Human activity can be fluid, because people could move from place to place, bringing other organisms with them and artificially isolate them with there original population by geographical barrier.

What does this fluid mean? I think it means a mutually changeable, reversible movement of material.

(This is a make up for last site reflection hw)

I happened to stay up late before thanksgiving. I was preparing for my exams and forgot to put down the curtain. Then, when I suddenly looked outside the window, I saw a bright moon hiding part of itself in clouds.

The clouds, twisted in shape and curled to form a whirl pool, were like a tunnel to another space. When moonlight--or rather, the light reflected by the moon--shines on the clouds, part of them became bright and even more mysterious. They were moving slowly, like cotton, like snow, like fluid. They remind me of Dracula's castle and Glass Mountain, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Alice's Wonderland.

The massive darkness and light brightness of the night melted, rested, condensed in my eyes. The movement of the clouds crushed the unchanging scene, breaking it in all direction, and when it stopped, everything was back in peace--again.

As one unique representative of Asian cultures, Chinese culture has more traditions than many other countries. Among all these traditions, women remain in a disadvantageous for over 2000 years. The history doesn’t include the appropriate proportion of women until recent century. It’s impossible to understand Maxing Hong Kinston’s The Women Warrior without a broader background of Chinese culture as well as the environment where Chinese American live. Author made her way through to find a voice for herself under the Chinese culture castle.

Girls are told to be quite and silence is considered as a means of self-protection. The term “ghost” is used extensively throughout the article. Such a term was generally used by Chinese people to call foreigners. The phrasing ghost and ghost country clearly impose negative indications considering the unpleasant history every time when westerners showed up in the Chinese territory. The hostility and resistance towards these foreigners, whose appearance and cultures are distinctive in general, never disappeared. Such fear in addition of uncertainties in a new country made silence a default choice for a large group of Chinese Americans from the beginning.