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The sun is casting its last hour of glory on the roof of Rockefeller and Goodhart. The warmth of sunshine is back this weekend. So am I back on the lawn behind carpenter. The benches we- Ecological Imagining group - sat on shivering on Tuesday was still somewhat in a circle. Yet the conversation is gone. The air is quite without the think-aloud reading of Kincaid’s “Alien Soil.” I could hear rustles from far away, is it the wind in the trees? Or is it the water on the rock beds?

What am I doing on the bench? Reflecting. Am I productive in the value system where only what can be counted counts? Definitely not. I am spending an hour, $12.5 tuition (calculated by my friend) writing a short passage. Yet the conversation we had takes time to digest, reflect, and ruminate – one of the intangible thing I am doing simultaneously. And the intangible appreciation for nature and cosmology view of the universe Bryn Mawr college is teaching me every minute of the day can not easily prized with a number.

When I saw that we were reading Wendy Brown, after we had read some of her quotes in Sweeney’s book, I was prepared to feel negatively about her.  I’m not sure if I understood correctly, but when reading “Reading is my Window” I understood that Sweeney was often arguing against Brown’s words and I often find myself taking the authors side.  So it was interesting to begin reading Brown feeling like I was going to question everything she said (when normally I tend to go along with the authors words), and this was more complicated by the fact that I had to read slowly to understand.  I tried to read critical, and even though I thought I would be against a lot of what she wrote, what I understood mostly made sense to me, but was also complicated by the fact that a lot of it seemed paradoxical.  Examples of some paradoxes I stumbled across were:

This week in my spot was beautiful. Instead of being a kind of quiet, unprovoking beauty, the view from where I sat, and the act of taking this photograph of it, prompted many questions. I realized that what I was doing was an act of artistic expression, and that even the very things I saw within frame of my lense were not entirely nature, but some past human artistic expression as well. I thought:

What does artistic expression have to do with ecology? Where does 'art' fit into the natural ecosystem? What value does it have regarding the health of all things on the planet?

I really enjoyed reading Wendy Brown's essay on Freedom Silences, especially because that it's a text that can be used as a frame to read other texts, events and experiences. I also think that a big part of why I enjoyed he text so much is because I did the kind of close reading that we did in Anne's class last week. I was particularly by the way in which breaks down the traditional ways in which we think of silence and oppression as standing in contradiction with freedom and voice. This helped me recall my experience abroad last semester in which I equated having power and feeling "free" or valued with "schooling", as I called it, people's statements that posed immigrants, people of color, Muslims, the poor as inferior. In my mind, this "voice" was freeing and I needed to speak out and get angry every time I encountered such statements. Soon enough, however, it became exhausting and I no longer felt free. It's as if all of a sudden I was back in jail that I had created for myself in feeling the need to fight every battle, get upset, and then realize that the person's point of view had not changed.

The cozy corner of the moonbench is its own little haven within itself. Anyone is welcome to sit there and enjoy what it has to offer. The upward view of senior row makes the path toward the moon bench a subtle, natural focal point of beauty. At the same time the moon bench lays empty often. The tradition goes if you kiss your significant other while sitting on the bench you will break up. This does not attract many couples. Plus the bench is also cold an hard like most man-made structures while the bushes bend around it to soften its features and the trees create a cocoon. The simplicity of the moon bench allows it to just sit and be its self. To have a timeless face and never change. Unlike the people and naute around it.

I walked along the Labyrinth and enjoyed the mild, delightful sunny day. The yellow leaves glowed in the sun. What a serene Sunday morning! Students walked around the campus; field hockey players were in a game; squirrels happily enjoyed the breakfast. The Bryn Mawr bubble created such a peaceful environment for each community member to thrive happily. The Labyrinth did have a complicated structure. The end looked so near at one point, but after I took a turn, the route led me to an outermost ring. Turn around and around, the sense of back and forth, close and far repeated again and again. I felt I was almost there, however, this was an illusion. Because the route I saw was not the route I walked on.

It’s a beautiful day today. The sun is warm and the sky is clear. I am very happy to be outside.

The trees behind the English house don’t discriminate among themselves by class, gender, race or sex (or if they do I can’t tell). The trees probably have some sense of sex difference among themselves, but I’m not sure if they have any sense of the meaning of class gender or race. These words probably don't mean much to the trees (most likely for the better). But the English House itself signifies wealth and higher class. Mostly because of what goes on inside of it -- students learning and professors teaching and working. College in this country is not something that is limited to people of a higher class, but is a place that is harder for people of a lower class to get to. This means that the people around the backyard of the English house would usually be a part of the upper middle class. It isn’t the trees themselves that make race gender and class significant, it’s this people who surround the trees, and the perceptions of those people.

Just came back from my old spot on a warm winter Sunday morning. It was good to see the sun again on the blue clear sky. In my mind I always associate sunshine with happiness and joy, I associate the shreds of sunshine on a row of trees with liveliness. But there is no such association today. Sunshine brightens up the space but cannot take away the sad shades of autumn on the falling leaves. Somehow, it makes me think of the end of the beginning. People say spring is time for a new beginning, when plants come to life after winter doldrums and grow and thrive in the summer. Then comes autumn when they begin the shred their leaves just to wait for long winter to go and the spring to come back to life. I cannot help feeling the sentimental.

And then I thought, if I were to draw a picture of this picturesque place, I would have a hard time trying to sketch out the patterns. There is actually hardly any pattern since nature is about randomness. Among the trees that are still green there are those that have turned yellow or those that have no more leaves, randomly. Among the trees that are so tall and big there are those much shorter or larger, randomly. Merely looking at this place I would say there is not class division here in nature. Unlike human society, I cannot point out which plant is of higher authority or which is oppressed. It does not seem like a bad thing to nature, because they all grow and thrive and will die some day…

Last night, my site was different than usual. For one, I visited the site at night. The tree I sit under has also lost a lot of leaves. When I was wondering around last night, trying to find my usual branch, I was scared out of my wits. The tree looked incredibly different--I wasn't sure if I was looking in the right tree. And I couldn't see any squirrels (which is not a good thing, because they have become very fond of sneaking up on me). So, despite not being very religious? I said the Hail Mary out loud over and over again. But, after I'd found the spot andfoully checked out the tree with my flashlight for squirrels, I managed to settle down a lot. The only noise I could hear was from humans. I could hear myself, and also a lot of noise from Radnor and a few people walking by the tree. The piece of "nature" I go to every weekend is really not in nature. Now that the leaves aregoing, it no longer even looks like that might bepossible. It's very touches by the well-to-do "nature" of the college. It's even touched by religion.