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.
