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Hey guys, here is a link for the album where I uploaded the photos I took yesterday! Feel free to share and download them. The password to access it is serendip .

http://s749.beta.photobucket.com/user/sharaai/library/Mural%20Arts%20Tour%20and%20Eastern%20State%20with%20360

As some of you know, Sharaai and I worked with an organization called Shining Hope for Communities this summer, teaching at a free school for girls.  Some of you have noticed our bags and bracelets, which we brought back from Kenya.  These bags and bracelets are made by women in Kibera (the area we worked in) who are HIV positive.  They sell these bags and bracelets as their source of income.  Some of you have asked about these products and so we're going to bring them to class Tuesday and sell in the ten minutes before Jody's class begins (12:45-12:55) and after Anne's class ends (after 3:45).  Bags are $20, bracelets are $5.  

Here is the organizations website and a few pictures of our time there (yes, I am trying to bribe you with the girls' cuteness):

As I have been reading my classmates posts about our field trip yesterday, I find myself agreeing with everyone and all the comments on their postings- the problem is a lot of what people are saying are in someway contradictory, so it is hard for me to understand how I agree with everyone.  I keep reminding myself that nothing is black and white and that my mixed feelings are reasonable. While we were on the tour, it reminded me of when I was in Kenya and would see white people going on slum tours and how upset it made me feel; part of me feels the two situations are very different, given that the level of disparity is so much less, but part of my knows it would not have come to mind if the similarities were not there.  Our guide was an especially interesting person to me.  I believe he and the organization he represents are extremely well intentioned, however sometimes good intentions go awry.  For example, when we were looking at the victim mural and someone drove by blasting loud music our guide said "someone needs to get that guy a paint brush!"   I believe this tour guide cared deeply for the community, and really wanted the best for the people living there.  However, I wonder if his method, and the methods of this Mural Arts organization are constraining and restricting to some.  Who is to say if loudly playing music is more or less helpful than painting a mural.  Who is to say that murals are better than street art?  Also, I wonder why he wanted us to wave at everyone?

Blazing heat grazing my skin. Then sudden coldness, the hairs on my arms standing up. And repeat. Countless times. I am at the cloisters and I am listening to the Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone soundtrack on my MP3 player. The sounds of "Hedwig's Theme" flutter through my earphones, first softly, then powerfully, as I take a deep breath of fresh air. The blanket I am sitting on prevents me from touching the grass, but I can still feel it under the blanket with my hands and bare feet. There is a soft breeze coming from some unknown place, welcome when the sun is out, unwanted when gray clouds cover the sky and a chill runs through my bones. Although I am a person that generally likes the cold and cloudy, today I feel grateful for the sun and warmth, for it was more inviting than my stuffy room. Being out in the open gives me a clear head and focus, helping me with my task at hand: self-guided meditation and purposeful muscle relaxation. I have been so stressed out this whole past week that I have rarely had the time to stop and take a cleansing breath to relax. Therefore, I decided that when I visited the cloisters this week I would focus on unwinding from the busy week and spend some time on myself. Even though the course is titled 'Ecological Imaginings' and it may not necessarily immediate allude to paying attention to oneself, I feel that I am just as an important part of the environment and the ecosystem that we call 'Bryn Mawr' as any bird, squirrel, insect, or plant.

Feeling of being

alone in a place lined with

sectioned window panes.

Woman walks across

with a book in her small hands

and sits close to me.

I cannot pretend 

to be alone anymore

my breath isn't free.

She snaps a photo

in the dusk and dying light

could it be of me?

Air is crisp and still

sky is blue like winter ice

earth has brought autumn.

The woman has left

As we stopped to visit the healing walls on the mural tour yesterday, I was surprised by my reaction to the offender wall. I think it was the combination of the music coming from the community service event across the street and the large exposed grass area in front of the mural that somehow made it much more appealing to me. The mural itself was more exposed than the victim mural and I felt a rush of sadness come over me as I took the time to understand the color scheme in the mural. I think the thing that I found myself really focusing on was the distant memories of families that were painted on the far bottom left corner. When most people think about offenders, they are are overwhelmed by images of their crime and thier feelings of vengence that they forget about the families they leave behind, and how much of the consequence and effect of committing a crime is really seen in the families of the offenders. As a society we focus on the victims of crime and neglect the offender, by which I mean we focus on helping the victims heal by attaching negative attention to offenders. But, as we have seen in our vision class, the definiton of victim becomes really obscure when we add the social context out of which both victims and offenders come from. When a member of a community is incarcerated that community including the family becomes more and more disenfranchised.

I barely touched the soil. I sat on a tree branch and listened. I listened to the back and forth of bugs. Conversing with others, trying to scare others away, or making noise just because they could, I don't know. All I know is that they spun a song that only I, under their willow tree, could hear. This afternoon, I parted the vines that the falling willow branches formed. I decided which of the four large branches to sit on, and then I listened. I expected the shade of the tree to make the chilly day even more goose bump-inducing, but the enclosure that the willow's branches formed made me more cozy, so I didn't notice the chill as much as I had walking to the tree. After I sat, I walked around the tree, as if to pay respect to all of the tree's attributes, not just the one branch I sat on. There are initials gashed into the tree's exterior, some hearts, some that seem to have been made by lovers, and others by one person trying to stake his or her claim on the tree. I saw a pool of water that has been there every time I have paid tribute to that willow, stagnant in a basin that a root has opened into. I decided that I will work my way up the branches. Today, even though I was sitting in the tree, my feet were still firmly on the ground. Next Sunday, I'll go higher. I'll slide and climb and jump my way onto the highest position I can sit in by the end of this project. Along with observing the word under the tree, I'll also become more adventurous, inch by inch, and Sunday by Sunday.

Silence feels a whole lot more complicated than it did when I wrote my first paper on the images of protest that Esty used to represent silence, and the difference between my feelings and thoughts about silence now and the image I posted three weeks ago of the moonrise, my image of silence, is huge. Over the summer, because I was alone in a country where I did not speak the language fluently, I became accustomed to silence, and though I hated and feared it at first, I grew to appreciate it, even need it to some degree. That, I suppose, is where the calm, peaceful image of space comes from.

Since then, I’ve begun to see silence everywhere and nowhere, to relish breaks in conversations or class discussions even as my skin crawls from the discomfort, to take out my headphones as I walk so that I can better hear the silence and noise of my mind. There are so many ways to conceptualize silence and so many judgments to be made; is it good or bad? A privilege or oppression? A presence or an absence? I have come to see that it is all of these things and more, though I’ve yet to show whether or not I can articulate my feelings. “How would you now visualize-and-vocalize silence?” The visualization is not so hard, but the vocalizing, the explanation, being coherent…that’s where I often stumble and retreat to silence.

                In reexamining one of the class’ visual representations, I chose to reexamine the visualization I had previously looked at, the one that was a shot of the Haverford Nature Trail. As I am looking at the image once again while keeping in mind the keywords we were using in class, I managed to come up with some new ways to visualize my picture. When I first began to reexamine the photo, I was under the impression that the definitions of the words would clearly fit in with the visualization of the Nature Trail or they wouldn’t. In my view, permaculture did not fit well with the photo’s image, as the Nature Trail was not designed for agricultural purposes and gives off no sign of being a self-sustaining natural system. On the other hand though, I was harder time examining the photos and trying to figure out whether anthropocentric and garden fit into the visualization of the image. It could be argued by some that the Nature Trail as displayed in the photo, is not an example of an anthropocentric environment as the Nature Trail’s purpose is to highlight the natural qualities of the Haverford arboretum rather centralizing the focus on the artificial and man-made aspects of the campus. At the same time though, the Nature Trail was created with the intent of increasing human enjoyment of the campus and the arboretum.

Upon arrival in the backyard of the English house I assessed my seating options. The first option that caught my eye was a lightly colored jagged rock, which did not seem like the best option. Next I saw a stool, a lone bench, and a picnic table with one bench on either side. I sat one the lone bench without considering the grass or the stones embedded in the grass.

I didn’t really have a plan for my time here. So for a large portion of the time I sat and thought about what I should do. I felt like I needed an activity or an experiment to do so that I would be able to write my reflection thoughtfully.

So I came up with a plan: I would sit with my eyes closed. Vision seems to be the most prized of the five senses. It is the way I primarily and consciously analyze the the world around me on a daily basis. It’s the sense I used when I entered the space to analyze my sitting options. It’s my default sense. So to cut off vision would be to cut off the safety-net sense, and it would force me to analyze the world though a different lense.