What Nature Means to Me Now--Blog Entry #10 (Prompt: ENG 584 Reflection)

Before entering this class, I wrote very little about the natural world, the concept of God, and the mysticism of both. The Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, spoke of how poets must move through the world, "step by step among things and beings...never isolating, but rather containing them all within a blind expansion of love.” The natural world was not a space I could easily access or know. It was a mythical space simultaneously beautiful and frightening. I could not understand how the natural world could thrive and keep breathing as if nothing was happening inside of it, as if there was no suffering, no human pain. Unlike Neruda, I was isolating myself, separating my body from the natural space that contained it and ultimately preserved it.

This class opened my mind to what it means to be natural and what it means to have a body in the natural world. Mel explained that, “the natural world and our relationship with it are chock full of tension, conflict, contradiction, and complication.” Her insight offered me a different perspective and truth of the natural world and its connection to the human body. From this course, I began to be inspired by an assortment of nature writers, including Diane Ackerman, Terry Tempest Williams, Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver, and Gretchen Legler among others.

I was most inspired by Annie Dillard’s essay, “Living Like Weasels.” I was blown away by this piece and felt I came out of it truly inspired not only by Dillard’s permission to “grasp [my] own necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes [me],” but also inspired by her craft. She introduces her reader to an extraordinary finding of an eagle shot out of the sky with a weasel’s skull attached to its neck and uses that image as an extended metaphor until the very last sentence of the essay: “let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.” This was the piece I came back to when writing my final essay as it was the most lyrical and most poetic to me. I have learned from this essay, and from all of the works we have read, the way in which to infuse a piece on human experience with a natural element. I want to continue to work on writing about the natural world in a way that is both informative, but does not stray too far from the personal.

Many of the poems that I included in my final thesis manuscript were products of this place-based blog activity. These weekly blog visits helped me to know nature’s role in human suffering and humanity’s role in the sufferings of nature. The blog has proven to be my first true entrance into nature. Before I started writing from the cemetery, I never took the time to ‘just be’ in a natural space. I was always concentrating on the grander sense of nature and the world, overlooking the small bodies, the deer, the mallard ducks, the blue sky, the cold morning, the eastern pines, and the feeling and strength of the wind. I feel blessed that I was granted the opportunity to be in a space for a certain amount of time and to truly concentrate and reflect on that space. I now believe I am closer to knowing my role in the natural world and the natural world’s role in my life and in the ritual of suffering and mourning.

 

In my first blog post, I addressed the naked morning, asking “My father visited his brother’s grave almost every day for years. I want to know what he found. Do you know him, morning? Do you know if he is healed? If he is still healing?” I believe I found my father’s pain in this cemetery, among the pines, and I now know how he was healed—through this nature, through this beautiful and fleeting nature.  

The Sun's Leaving--Blog Entry #9

Sunday, April 7, 2013

10:00am

68˚F

Today I am not alone. The sun finally drove his bulged body out of the dark mouth of the sky like a swollen tongue to meet me. We didn’t plan it, although I heard he was coming. Everyone kept saying, any day now he will be here, we will see him float down and set himself on fire right there in front of us. It will be beautiful, they kept saying.

Everyone always forgets how fast he leaves us. How one morning he just won’t show up for breakfast and no one will ask where he is or if he is running late. Everyone will just accept his leaving as if we didn't need him. As if we didn't need our largest star, our greatest energy source.   

I am different than the others. I am hard on the sun. I scorn his scorched body every time he reappears to me. You’ve left me alone for so long, I say to him, you’ve left this cemetery to the misery of the empty sky. He will push out his large orange chest at me and break my stare. There is no one watching over the hole you’ve left behind, I warn him. You better be careful that some one doesn’t come by and plug it up with a bucket full of blue or black for good.  

What will happen when the sun dies? Astronomers say it will be cosmic chaos. It will not be like dying at all. When the sun reaches his last stage in stellar evolution he will begin to spiral out of control like being born again, seeing everything for the first time but in fast motion. The sun will bloat like a daylily in bloom, but much more violent as he sweeps through the inner solar system. He will enter into a brief helium-burning phase, sucking up Mercury and Venus in his rage. And then he will come for us—he will swallow up his dark hole with the left over light he saved from his leavings.

I trust the sun will give us our warning. I trust the astronomers' prediction, that it will be billions of years before he turns on us. For now, I sit and watch him warm the head stones and reflect them into the sky. Watch the mallard ducks fly under him and crisp their wings with his burning skin. Down here it seems like they are flying right into his center and he is releasing them like fire arrows onto the earth below.

As I stare at the sun from this cemetery, I imagine all the bodies staring up with me, squeezing their eyes to steal a glimpse of his shine. I imagine that is what gives the sun its color—all of our eyes melding into him like pieces of agitate crystal. 

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The Sun's Leaving--Blog Entry #9 Inspired By:

Give me the Splendid, Silent Sun

 By Walt Whitman

1 GIVE me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling;
Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard;
Give me a field where the unmow’d grass grows;
Give me an arbor, give me the trellis’d grape;
Give me fresh corn and wheat—give me serene-moving animals, teaching content;	5
Give me nights perfectly quiet, as on high plateaus west of the Mississippi, and I looking up at the stars;
Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers, where I can walk undisturb’d;
Give me for marriage a sweet-breath’d woman, of whom I should never tire;
Give me a perfect child—give me, away, aside from the noise of the world, a rural, domestic life;
Give me to warble spontaneous songs, reliev’d, recluse by myself, for my own ears only;	10
Give me solitude—give me Nature—give me again, O Nature, your primal sanities!
—These, demanding to have them, (tired with ceaseless excitement, and rack’d by the war-strife;)
These to procure, incessantly asking, rising in cries from my heart,
While yet incessantly asking, still I adhere to my city;
Day upon day, and year upon year, O city, walking your streets,	15
Where you hold me enchain’d a certain time, refusing to give me up;
Yet giving to make me glutted, enrich’d of soul—you give me forever faces;
(O I see what I sought to escape, confronting, reversing my cries;
I see my own soul trampling down what it ask’d for.)
2 Keep your splendid, silent sun;	20
Keep your woods, O Nature, and the quiet places by the woods;
Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn-fields and orchards;
Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields, where the Ninth-month bees hum;
Give me faces and streets! give me these phantoms incessant and endless along the trottoirs!
Give me interminable eyes! give me women! give me comrades and lovers by the thousand!	25
Let me see new ones every day! let me hold new ones by the hand every day!
Give me such shows! give me the streets of Manhattan!
Give me Broadway, with the soldiers marching—give me the sound of the trumpets and drums!
(The soldiers in companies or regiments—some, starting away, flush’d and reckless;
Some, their time up, returning, with thinn’d ranks—young, yet very old, worn, marching, noticing nothing;)	30
—Give me the shores and the wharves heavy-fringed with the black ships!
O such for me! O an intense life! O full to repletion, and varied!
The life of the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel, for me!
The saloon of the steamer! the crowded excursion for me! the torch-light procession!
The dense brigade, bound for the war, with high piled military wagons following;	35
People, endless, streaming, with strong voices, passions, pageants;
Manhattan streets, with their powerful throbs, with the beating drums, as now;
The endless and noisy chorus, the rustle and clank of muskets, (even the sight of the wounded;)
Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus—with varied chorus, and light of the sparkling eyes;
Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.

   

The Red-Bellied Woodpecker as Grief--Blog Entry #8 (Prompt #1)

I saw the red-bellied woodpecker on a walk in the forest with my father. It was after my uncle died. We were walking to a small stream to fish. My father was still mourning and I was too young to understand. I still remember the strikingly barred back of the red-bellied woodpecker as if white and black ribbons were sewn into his spin. He had a haunting beauty with his red cap, black-knifed beak, and pale body—a kind of beauty that could scare you away if you really focused on it, that could numb you. His body punctured the side of a dead snag and from his position I gathered he had only one eye. And that one eye stared down into my father and me, into our bodies, and sometimes I think I can still feel it. That eye was the smallest dark I’d ever seen and I knew something had to be darker inside of it.

He flew quickly and erratically through the forest, all around us, abruptly changing directions, alighting for an instant and immediately taking off again. All the while letting out a glut of long and deafening shrills, rolling kwirr or churr calls, coughing cha cha cha cries, throaty growls at the other birds, at the earth, at us. “Listen,” my father said, “listen to that violent sound.” This odd behavior is categorized as a type of play to help young birds escape predators, but it felt more like an evasive taunting as if our big bodies were this small body’s prey.

In the moment we finally caught him, when he finally let his body rest, and his throat quiet, he was wedging a large caterpillar into the barked scar of a tree. His long, sticky tongue teasing it, his one nail drilling into the seized caterpillar body, breaking it apart into manageable pieces that he could devour. He did devour them; all those bright pieces of caterpillar sliding down his throat into a dark hole. He was as unforgettable as grief. He was grief and the caterpillar was my father’s heart. I took them both out of the forest that day, my father and the red-bellied woodpecker—that one eye, that dark hole, and those two pale bodies. 

The Woodpecker

By Elizabeth Madox Roberts

The woodpecker pecked out a little round hole 

And made him a house in the telephone pole.

One day when I watched he poked out his head,
And he had on a hood and a collar of red.

When the streams of rain pour out of the sky,
And the sparkles of lightning go flashing by,

And the big, big wheels of thunder roll,
He can snuggle back in the telephone pole.