Winter

It snowed last night, and the leafless trees look like they’ve been coated with a layer of powdered sugar. As I walk around in the woods, the now is still falling. I didn’t check the temperature, but it’s fairly cold outside. I don’t feel cold, though. I actually feel a little bit overheated in my heavy winter coat, hat, and gloves.

I haven’t encountered any animals today. I think I hear a bird chirping somewhere, but I can’t see it. I didn’t think most birds stuck around southwestern Pennsylvania in the winter, with the cold and the snow and everything. I wonder where the turkeys are. I guess their feathers keep them warm in this chilly weather.

Everything seems very still and quiet. It’s difficult to find much color outside amongst all the white. With the snow still falling, even the sky looks white. It’s the perfect backdrop with Thanksgiving and the holidays right around the corner. Being in the woods behind my house is a stark contrast to walking along the street. The snow there has already begun to turn into slush. The pure white has been tarnished with black and brown dirt from cars driving by, and from the salt trucks put on the roads to make them passable.

The contrast between the way snow looks in the woods, a place that is (as far as I know) untouched by humans and the road that my house is on makes me think about our relationship with nature. I know that we can’t just let snow pile up on roads, but it seems strange to me that as humans we have the ability to completely change the way landscape and nature looks with fairly little effort.

This idea, of course, goes far beyond snow removal. The way we develop and change land is really interesting to me. We cut down trees to make strip malls. We tunnel through mountains to make highways. I wonder about the history of this concept of development, how we first started altering the land to make room for man-made things. What if, instead of destroying woods, we built buildings around or even within the woods? I don’t know how practical that would be, but I think it would be kind of fun to go shopping at Target and take a short walk through the woods on your way to your car. I wonder if in the future buildings will be more immersed in nature rather than separate from it. 

Turkeys Again (Entry Six)

The turkeys are back.  It’s raining, so I’m sitting under my deck, but I can still see them. There are maybe twelve or so this time. They don’t seem fazed by the rain.  They’re gathered under a small pine tree in my yard, in the spot where the grass stops and the woods starts. I really like these birds. They’re almost comical.  One of them lifts his feathers slightly and shakes back and forth, maybe to dry off? They don’t seem to be in much of a hurry to move or to do anything. A few are pecking at the ground, but not much else is happening. They’ve been outside in this spot under the tree for about half an hour. I wonder what it’s like to be a turkey.

I would imagine it would be scary – you never know when someone’s going to shoot you. These turkeys spend a lot of time in my yard and my neighbors’ yards, though, and I don’t think people can hunt this close to houses. Maybe these turkeys are safe. I don’t know where they go when they leave me yard, though.  They go into the woods, usually, but I don’t know where they go from there. I feel like they must roam beyond the small section of forest on my property, but I don’t really know.

I get up to take a picture and they scatter away, off into my neighbor’s yard. I must have startled them. I feel guilty for disturbing them in their habitat. When I see these wild creatures it reminds me of my struggle with eating meat. I recently decided to become a vegetarian, but I already messed up and ate sushi. It wasn’t even a conscious decision. I went to a Chinese restaurant with my family one night and ordered sushi. When I got home later that night, I realized that I ate fish, a once-living thing. I’ve since resumed my vegetarianism, but I didn’t even make it two weeks before screwing up. I’m not sure if this sushi accident is reflective of how strong my meat-eating habits are (or were), or if it means that I’m not that committed to not eating animals. After all, if I was truly resigned to this cause, wouldn’t I have remembered not to eat fish?  Since the turkeys have left, I guess I’ll go inside. I still want to go into the woods at night, so maybe I’ll try to do that this week at some point. 

What is School? (Entry Five)

Today, I don’t want to talk about nature, exactly.  But I do want to talk about what’s natural.  This blog entry is going to be kind of a rant, even though I don’t really think rants are very effective forms of writing.  Lately I’ve been really frustrated by the academic world.  Actually, I’ve been frustrated by it since I started college.  High school was kind of frustrating, too, when I think about it.  It’s a weird kind of frustration because I really enjoy learning, but the restrictions I feel like academia puts on free thought frustrate me.  The message I’ve been getting for a long time is, “Write what you want, as long as you have one space between sentences, a lengthy works cited page; worship MLA.”  This stuff infuriates me.  What happened to the meaning of people’s thoughts superseding punctuation?  I feel like in some ways grad school, college, and the academic world in general are crushing people’s natural ways of thinking, which is why I think it’s okay to post this “rant” on the nature writing blog. 

The dozens – hundreds? – of rules that come along with writing drive me insane.  So do the amount of requirements that are necessary to finish any program and earn a degree.  For example, I want to write creative fiction, yet I spend about 70-85% of my time analyzing other people’s (authors’) writing, and only 15-30% of my time working on my own.  I’m not trying to bash Chatham because I have been learning a lot here, I’ve met a handful of really caring professors, and I think at other schools the ratio of learning what you want versus what’s required is even more extreme.  But it seems to me like there’s a big problem across academia.  People are becoming so wrapped up in requirements and specificities that we aren’t getting anywhere new in education.  People seem to have just accepted these requirements, but I think at one time or another most of us have questioned whether our academic pursuits are really benefitting us, whether they’re benefiting anyone at all. 

So, to relate all this to what is natural… I think learning is something that occurs naturally.  When you’re a young kid and you touch a hot stove, you learn not to do that again because it hurts.  You didn’t need school to learn that.  There isn’t a “don’t touch the hot stove” degree.  By imposing requirements on students, the natural way of learning becomes convoluted.  I can’t offer a solution to this issue.  We need to have requirements in order to award degrees, and we need degrees in order to identify individuals who are qualified to perform various jobs.  I just wonder if there isn’t a more organic approach to higher education.