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.