Blogs

Thanks to Blair Howell for the following. I thought it might interest you.

While searching for articles, I stumbled across a lovely gem: Therapy Today (2005) "Wild at Heart: Another Side of Ecopsychology". Unfortunately it does not list an author, nor could I find a list of collaborators.

Today I was struck by the way the colors could almost be spring rather than fall. We're just at the precise indeterminate balance point... The few remaining greens are thin and sparse, and even the reds and russets have faded to a shade that could be the color of new leaves budding instead of old ones falling. The light, too, in the late afternoon-- a gentler, warmish day today-- could have been a blush of spring. It made me think about my mother. Something about cycles, and an equivalence between the seasons and the ages of (wo)man, so that old age is like the autumn drawing into winter, and just as fall can be mistaken for spring, so too old age has its kinship with childhood. My mother loves her wind-up bunny rabbit that can hop hop hop on the breakfast table: it can keep her entertained for a surprisingly long time. She's 87. And today at lunch, as we were talking about the birds at the bird feeder, species we've never seen before here (a red-bellied woodpecker!) and whether it's to do with climate change that they come further north now, and whether it's a bad thing because we have interfered with nature, and Mother says, "Well, humans are part of nature too. We are part of nature, and, we watch it." A kind of wisdom I would never have expected from her. Well, I didn't realize till I was almost middle-aged that my mother is someone who always kept track of the phases of the moon. "Oh yes, I'm a moon-watcher," she said. Does your mother watch the moon?

I decided to try something different today and went to my site at 9 pm instead of 9 am. It was cold and it was dark. (Thank you time change, although it would have been dark at 9 pm, regardless.) I had some reservations about going outside when it was so dark out, but these were tempered by the fact that lamps light our entire campus when the sun goes down. This got me thinking. Why are humans so obsessed with light? I guess that there are the obvious reasons- the sun is our greatest source of light and without it we would have no warmth, no air, and no food. Plants provide us with the latter two things and they could not grow without light. But I think another reason that we are afraid of the dark is because darkness represents the unknown and we are very uncomfortable with the unknown.

This thought process brought me to a show that I remember from years ago called, Are you Afraid of the Dark. The show, as its name suggest, takes place at night, and in the woods. This just got me thinking about how much fear our society still harbors for both nature and the dark. For some reason, setting a scary show outside only adds to its fear factor.

I visited the site in the snow/sleet and at night. These were two major changes to how I am used to seeing the Pond, so I found this to be a new experience. The water was dark, the trees were barely lit up by the lights from Rhoads dorm, so I did not venture out on the rock bridge this time. I did however stand at the fence and freeze. The cold has a way of waking me up, and it was snowing and the wind was very strong. I was so distracted by all these elements that I could barely pay attention to the site itself. It's been such a long time since I've seen snow, and coming from Arizona originally, I only really get to experience it when I'm here. So I was ecstatic, couldn't stay still, or pay attention to my surroundings much. The one thing I did notice though was the water. It was glistening in the surrounding lamplight and it literally looked like it was casting its own light rather than reflecting projected light. Once I noticed the water, I paid more attention; it was easy to see the rain drops cutting into the water, melding with it, and moving it. The water levels grew slowly higher and it was so so cold. I remeber feeling so overjoyed and all of my surroundings were friendly this time, rather than intimidating like they were during my Thoreauvian walk in the night. I thought of Sara G.'s post about how we project our own feelings onto our surroundings, perceiving our surroundings through the tunnel of our emotions. That felt just about right; I feel like that was precisely what was happening in this situation.

Reading about niches really got me thinking about my own personal niches, other's niches and specifically what the women at the Cannery do while they are there to make their niches.

When I think about my own niche and about it's relationship to Bryn Mawr, I realize that if I had not found my niches within the BMC community, in many locations, that my experiences here would not have been so fulfilled and satisfying. But my discovery of niches does not feel comparable to those in the reading. I feel that they are found coming from different reasoning but I also feel like they can be compared because people find niches for the same general reasons.

In connection to Doing Life, I wonder if those in the book found their own self-discovery as a niche. I say this because alot of the people in the book talk about how they have changed as people and how they have realized their mistakes that brought them to where they are. Have they found niches within their own minds that have allowed them to escape and reflect?

After our conversation today in Jody's class about Bryn Mawr as a walled community and the readings we did about the thinking behind the dorms of Bryn Mawr, I can't help making connections to Hans Toch's writing on "Transactions of Man and Environment" in that context. Hoch talks about the way an environment is so intricately related to human responses – thinking, feeling, acting, etc. I thought about the level of privacy M. Carrey Thomas envisioned for her students and how intricately privacy is linked with privilege. Those who could afford more privacy got it. And now, though rooming is not based on how much one pays or can afford to pay, in two room doubles, one student inevitably lives in the "maid's" room, which can and does create tensions between roommates. 

To stay or not to stay? I’ve been thinking a lot about where I want to sit to observe. This past weekend, when I was reading about Bryn Mawr from a book by Helen Horowitz, I was really struck by a chapter she had about tradition and the campus, where she talked about the way women related to their physical campus because of the traditions they had in different spaces on that campus. The more I thought about it, I liked the idea of doing a series of posts about a couple different physical places on campus outside that related either to my collective or individual memories of traditions at Bryn Mawr. I wanted to see how traditions and memory made a difference in the place you observe. For this particular post, I chose the cloisters.

Today I continued my experiment that I started last week. I kept some leaves and needles that I couldn't identify around my spot to see how far they blew in from the hurricane.

I found some matching needles from the group of trees on Erdman Green between the health center and the dining hall, which is close enough to make sense but still pretty far in terms of wind gust strength.

One odd red leaf that looks like a cross between a maple leaf and a tiny palm frond (really) was still nowhere to be found, even though I was pretty determined to find where it came from because it seems like it would be an interesting tree. This means it probably traveled very far before it fell onto the steps behind Erdman Circle.

A lot of the leaves came from the pretty tree that once had shocking red/orange fall foliage under the streetlamp on the path from the arch to Erdman. Last week, they stood out in wonderful bright colors, but this week they are mostly a muddy shade of brown just like the rest of the leaves on the Overlook behind the Circle.

The branch I brought back is a holly branch. Those are very sturdy and it just seems unlikely that a storm could pull one off of a holly tree, but I guess it can.

In "Sing Soft, Sing Loud" I found a couple of quotes to be pretty interesting. One quote was said by Iva, and she comments about the single window that she has in her cell. She appreciates watching the palm tree outside this window but then theorizes, "I think maybe they put it there just to make us miserable" (3). It just reminded me of our tour earlier this semester at ESP because I couldn't believe how little the windows were. I never realized the significance of windows and never took the time in my everyday life to understand why spaces are designed the way they were, but I'm glad our 360 is forcing me to do that now. We don't really notice windows and we also take them for granted. They can either feel like they're entrapping you in this space or freeing you by allowing you to see what the world has in store outside. I noticed that one of our dorms, Merion, has ridiculously tiny windows. Every time I visit some friends there I feel miserable because there's barely enough glass to let in some natural sunlight, which is something that Iva complains about too.

As I was reading both Cyd Berger and Diane Weaver's stories in Doing Life, I was struck by the idea that for some women, prison is more of a haven or a refuge, where they can stop "living for everyone except" themselves and be free of the problems that they must cope with outside of the prison walls: extreme poverty, domestic violence (as in the case of Diane), rape, and homelessness. Both these women found prison to be a place where they could find the time to be "human" and could become "sort of a role model" for others. The notion that prison is a space where one can re-evaluate their role in society has been a common denominator in every stage of the expansion of the prison industrial complex, but understanding how this notion is seen from the perspective of the bodies trapped inside the walls is crucial to understanding what aspects of this space are actually positive. A similar perspective is seen in McConnel's Sing Soft, Sing Loud When the narrator in the story gets agitated with "the tourist" (the newest addition to the prison) because she can't stop complaining, crying, and "moaning" about her life and why she was "jailed". The narrator states: "...no one wants to talk to her in case she falls to pieces...we don't like people failing to pieces around here. It makes everybody do hard time and besides, it triggers a chain reacton, y'know what I mean?"