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Ahh who ever thought sitting down could be so restless trying to avoid the rain covered seat. I feel like a biirdy on a perch trying to mimic my fellow birdies in the area. When in fact they are actually silent. Is this not a chipper day? The dark clouds overcast, the bone chilling cold blowing through my jacket. This is quite a lovely day for me! I breath in through my noise and as the cold air enters my lungs it causes me to cough and clear my throat. I like the feeling of my toes vibrating everytime I wiggle them as the sharpe jolts of pain shoot around my foot.  I cannot be happier as I hear the acorns dropping all around me and wonder if one will make its way down onto my head. Kerplunk! Oh wait, that landed next to me. I enjoy giving up my comfort to sit on the top of the bench instead of letting my butt get drenched. I enjoyed trying a more comedic approach to nature because us as humans always seem so uncomfortable when we go outside our comfort zone and cannot get comfortable. So I thought I would play on that uncomfotableness and make it humerous since we all experience it.

I have been here since I was young, and short. The world I have been living in is a small and limited land. I grow up higher and higher just to see the surrounding with all its elements stay (almost) the same. Characteristics of shapes, colors, positions, etc. make no difference: they have all been there for too long and become too familiar that there is no reason for them to have a name. We are always in sight with each other I never miss or forget. However un-diverse and familiar this world is to me, it is still mysterious. Questions obsess me whether anything lies underneath the surface of water over there, whether I and all the tall plants that look exactly like me are of the same kind and so on. I long for an answer. I long for a better understanding of this world. The inability to move is a hardship. Whether it rains or shines, cold or hot, I am standing here observing and confusing myself. There are strangers who come to my world, stay for a while then leave me, even more puzzled, behind. There are fast-moving animals that keep running around and on my body, as if showing off their superior ability and teasing my helpless self. Giant as I am to many other beings, I feel incompetent to the world.

To examine the genre of my written Thoreuvian Walk is difficult. I don't know whether I can quite name it in a specific genre. It is not a tragedy, it's not a comedy. Is a reflection a genre? I think my "walk" is still quite like a pastoral, but it does explore partially the idea of the hidden and the parts of the earth that are difficult to navigate. So maybe it's slightly Gary Snyder-esque? That's what I will call it now, a pastoral with hints of Gary Snyder. So now to write it into a different genre. Not sure what to call it? Not exactly a tragedy, but sort of leaning toward it.

Original:

Rain. Much colder, getting colder. I came to campus to swim, but the open swim is closed (that's what I'm told, in those words!) so that volley ball players can use all the locker rooms. (Thanks a bunch, Claire and Zoe!) So, to the labyrinth, with the intention of going deeper. Slower, deeper. Stepping into deep dreaming space, circling towards union. Greet the beech tree first: the "three ladies" are hugely bigger than I remember them: my photographs, which I've been looking at all week, have no reference for scale, and make them look small, graceful, like normal size tree trunks. In fact they are huge and graceful. The trunk of this tree is enormous, much thicker than one would expect from the overall profile of the tree. In my paper I compared these three trunks to my grandmother, my mother, and me. Does their surprising size tell me something about us, our deceptive, unobvious size and power? I sneak a wilderness pee under the shelter of the tree's hanging branches. No one around, no one watching, but I feel illicit, get away with it.

Going deeper already, I sense/imagine down into the earth, the curve of the hill, picturing/feeling grass over earth over rock.

I found it interesting how Wideman used space, time and distance as measures of success at the beginning of the book. It seems like he really reflects on his desire to separate himself not only from his neighborhood and his relationship with brother but also from his own identity. He doesn’t seem to be proud of it, but simply acknowledge the complexity, and perhaps reason as to why his relationship with his brother is so broken.

The quote that strikes me the most is on page 27 when he said, "One measure of my success was the distance I'd put between us. Coming home was a kind of bragging...It's sure fucked up around here ain't it? But look at me, I got away." I think that this quote really exemplifies the belief that success and his home stand in direct opposition, that he must leave one in order to embrace the other, even though later on the book he complicates this idea. Although I understand that there must be a refashioning of the self in order to fit into alien spaces, I don’t think that it is absolutely necessary to choose one or the other. It seems to me that the distance and the silence can in fact point not just to the fact that him and his brother are different because of his “choice to be successful” but also to the fact that the awkwardness exists because of their history and blood, because that awkwardness and guilt would not manifest itself through silence if they were not intrinsically tied. 

I began this post by looking up a list of genres on Wikipedia. What I was specifically looking for was one that encompassed science, but still told a story. I have a friend who is interested in the emerging field of narrative medicine, and I had hoped that I would be able to find something along the same lines pertaining to ecology. The general idea behind narrative medicine is that you treat a person as a whole, and not just a cluster of symptoms. You allow people to contextualize their ailments in terms of the schema of their lives as opposed to the often cold and impersonal jargon that is so common in medical fields. See also: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/education/edlife/03narrative.html.

This made me wonder, could we solve more of our current ecological problems by taking this sort of approach to the environment. This is very closely related to what Berry and other authors we’ve read this semester have said; Recontextualize how we think about “nature” (a slippery term in itself.) This would not automatically solve any of the problems that we have created for ourselves, but just thinking in terms of different stories would give us the necessary insight to work on these problems.

I had the goal of rewriting this post: /exchange/“traditional”-ecology-field-guide-flowers in a more narrative way. Right now it seems very straight forward and scientific, so I think I need to make it more inviting for the reader.

From yesterday's NYTimes: Who's in Charge Inside Your head?
"Buddhists note that our skin doesn’t separate us from the environment, but joins us, just as biologists know that “we” are manipulated by...the rest of life....Where does the rest of the world end, and each of us begin? Let’s leave the last words to a modern icon of organic, oceanic wisdom: SpongeBob SquarePants....'Absorbent and ...and porous is he'...are we, too."

 Here are two youtube videos I would like to juxtapose having to do with a real fight amongst students from my hometown and then a staged wrestling match that the mayor involved herself in.  It seems atrocious to me that the mayor involved herself in a staged fight (a form of entertainment it seems) and then come down so harshly when students perceive a real fist fight as a form of entertainment.  What example is she setting?  Also, I love how the news station is chastising the students for videotaping the fight, but yet they continue to show the video.

News clip of students fighting

News clip of mayor discussing her staged wrestling match

This might seem directly related to prisons, but it does lend to conversations about who is allowed to participate in certain acts (the right to be violent, perhaps?) and who is punished for such acts.  It also demonstrates the role of schools as punishers, but what does the punishment of a suspension really do?

In Wideman's book, I noticed that he touched on the notion of life going on "on the outside" while incarcerated people seem to stay where they are, removed from the passing of time, but unable to fit back into the world without acknowledging the time that has passed. Wideman measures the first few years of Robby's sentence by his daughter Jamila's growth, seeing that, although she is growing up in a changing world, Robby's world is centered around staying put, where Jamila's growth is a strong, and perhaps the only, reliable measurement of changes in time. This reminds me of the discussion that we had in Barb's class yesterday about time and boredom as a means of punishment. The women in the prison that she is studying have so much time on their hands, so much time to do what relatively few activities that they have, and the rest to be filled with a monotonous boredom. Given both our discussion and Wideman's thoughts, I think the passage of time without activity, motion or change is an effective punishment, but a horribly cruel one, a method by which we, once again, deny the humanity of those who are incarcerated.

A friend just shared w/ me an AMAZING review of "Are You My Mother?" by Heather Love (an English professor @ Penn), which I want to share w/ you all: http://publicbooks.org/fiction/the-mom-problem  As you know, I really REALLY did not like the book on my first reading, but this review has gotten me re-thinking/re-feeling my damning critique ...I will now have to go back and re-experience it, for sure...

A few bits to tease you into the review-->

Bechdel's quip: "I think people who are well-adjusted are not going to be interested in this story...
Fortunately, there are a lot of people who are not well-adjusted.”

Then there are Love's several insights (to have such a name!), including the difficulty of portraying "resentment and ambivalence toward the mother as an inevitable result of her role as caretaker," and also her lovely LOVELY final evocation of Winnicott's question about

“where we most of the time are when we are experiencing life.” He thinks we're in a space of “deep dreaming" that is created between individuals, and between individuals and their environment. What I am thinking now is that your "site sits" might be such spaces (if you can allow them to be). And what I am wondering is whether we can make (are we making?) our shared classroom time into such a space. We'll return to these questions when we read Thomas Barry's essay, "Dream of the Earth," but I wanted to flag them now.