Tareva - Week 11

As I mentioned before, it's rare that I experience a natural setting so I've decided to share the thoughts I wrote about my excursion to the Lion's Bridge:

Unfortunately, I had to miss the class field trip to the Lion’s Bridge. After reading the designated sections of the Annie Dillard text, a packed up my boyfriend and a lunch from Panera Bread and headed to the trail. To be quite honest I was petrified for having missed the field trip because I assumed I’d need direct instruction of how to communicate with nature and really hear what nature was telling me. I thought that I was going to need the “earthy” people in our class to play the middle man between myself and nature to help provoke the conversations. I was wrong.

It was a relatively nice day outside; not too chilly and definitely not hot. When we arrived at the bridge we were weak from starvation so we sat on the cool, stone steps facing the trees and the water and ate our goodies. We properly disposed of our trash and began to tramp around on the grass just below the steps where we sat to eat. I explained to my boyfriend, Jonothan, that we were to be communicating with nature while we explored the outdoors. I am still not sure if he grasped the concept of what we were doing but I definitely had my moments when I felt as if the wonders of nature were speaking directly to me.

Let us begin with the grass. I struggle with wrapping my head around communicating with something that does not also speak but I understand the importance of connecting with the natural world, so I slipped my shoes and socks off in order to grant my feet direct contact with the ground. I guess I figured nature’s thoughts would be absorbed by my bare soles. As funny as that may sound, it is almost exactly what occurred. I immediately began to communicate with the grass – by first yelling at it because of its slightly unfriendly prickle. Soon after ignoring the discomfort beneath my feet I began to concentrate on what the ground might be saying to me. I realized that the only way to know would be to examine the ground and focus on its every detail in hopes of receiving communication in return. I played with individual blades of the grass with my toes then bent down to feel it between my fingers. Pulling a few blades from the grass bed I smelled it, thought about tasting it but did not, threw it about, and watched it land back into the rest of its family. I even pulled out just enough blades to arrange into the letters that form my boyfriends name and made him take a picture with it. As I played in the grass, with the grass, I felt that individual blades were telling me different things. The bed of grass I was sitting on was crying out for relief, the blades of grass I was toying with my toes seemed to almost shiver as if to say they were ticklish, and the blades of grass that I uprooted and tossed about said words of appreciation for freeing them and giving them the opportunity to truly dance in the wind.

Walking further along, we trampled through high weeded areas, not necessarily cut out for gallivanting, and noticed lots of fallen twigs and branches. The condition of each stick communicated with us almost exactly how long its newest home had been the ground. Some of the twigs were rotting and showed clear signs of having been wet. Other sticks were bone dry and covered in dirt. Some of the branches, I recognized, had fallen from trees directly above their location on the ground. Besides being able to see the exact points on the trees where the branches had fallen from, or been torn from, I knew the branches used to be a part of those trees because it seemed like the trees were looking down upon the piles of twigs as if they missed their company.

We walked for quite some time, discovering things like rocks that were actually comfortable to sit on, and birds I’d never seen before. I thought that this assignment was going to be much harder seeing as how before this semester I would have thought it impossible to communicate with trees and such, but I did just as C.S. Lewis advised in The Four Loves and didn’t examine nature for its surface properties or beauty but, instead, I really made an attempt to hear what the trees, the grass, the rocks, etc. were saying to me. What came as a shock was that they actually have a lot to say! Collectively, all of the natural components of the Lion’s Bridge spoke to me by letting me know that I can go there whenever I’d like to relax, be completely comfortable, and have a chat. The landscape informed me that Jonothan and I are more than welcome to join them anytime.