Semester Long Epiphany

     On our first day of class I remember our teacher asking us to go around the room and tell our major and why we took this class.  I was seated almost directly in the middle of the classroom and heard the first half of the class talk about how they were either Environmental Studies majors, thinking about majoring in Environmental Studies, or English majors.  Here I was, a Psychology major senior just needing an upper levels honors course having no connection whatsoever to the environment or English.  I had never taken any type of course in Environmental Studies and my last English course had been 3 years ago.  After this classroom discussion and seeing the syllabus with all of the activities and projects, I figured this would be the class that I “bull crapped,” my way through.  I knew then I would have to make up a lot of personal stories and “connections,” with nature in order to fulfill the course objective, finding my place in nature.  Even the title of the class made me chuckle.  After these hypotheses I made in the first day of class I could never have imagined myself connecting with this course, seeing this course relate to my major and minors, or having found my place in nature.  I made connections with this course and its objective as soon as we discussed some of the work we read in class.  These connections grew with each guest speaker and project, and my final connection and overall epiphany was connected with the final digital storytelling project. 

            I had obviously disconnected myself with nature at some point in my life, where this happened I am still not sure, but my first realization that this connect was apparent was when discussing John Burroughs “The Art of Seeing Things.”  Not only had I realized that in my busy life, focusing heavily on my career and preparations for it, had I stopped simply taking a closer look at things.  I had a deep connection to Burroughs’s statement that: “But nothing can take the place of love. Love is the measure of Life: only so far as we love do we really live.  The variety of our interests, the width of our sympathies, the susceptibilities of our hearts- if these do not measure our lives, what does?,” (Burroughs, p.147).  I had been so focused on my future career the past 4 years here, that I let this focus get in the way of passion.  This passage helped me to create an emotional connectedness with nature.

             My second connection was made with a combination of reading Tom Looking for Hickories and his discussion with our class.  Reading his work really started my connection with my past experiences with nature and how these have impacted my life.  I had never read work that I could relate so closely to home, and my connections to his work brought me back to my childhood.  His piece “Forgotten Fossils From a Local World,” gave a me a sense of childhood euphoria that brought back many memories I had long forgotten, memories that had been shoved aside by tests, graduate school applications, internships, and a lack of sleep.  A section that really stayed with me was in “Forgotten Fossils From a Local World,” when he said “In the way of most natural discoveries, the moment was magic and unexpected.  Jody told me at school about the fossil beds and we peddled to the creek after baseball practice.  We parked our bikes at the small bridge, its pavement warm, and its blackened timbers sweet with the scent of sun-baked creosote… But that feeling, of kneeling at dusk with wet sneakers and the world’s mysteries at my feet, is a touchstone memory of childhood,” (Springer, p. 8).  I was shocked at the physical sense of nostalgia I got from reading Tom Springer’s work, and his presentation helped me to start making connections back to my childhood experiences.  Tom Springer’s presentation also gave me great insight to creative writing and its structure.  I had been writing lab reports, behavior modification protocol, and research based papers for the last 3 years and his insight gave me motivation to write some more creative pieces.

            My last connection was made in our unit with Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  This connection was probably the easiest for me to make because it hit so close to home for me.  My personal connections to this class have also been reflected in a lot of concepts I have found in my minor Social Psychology.  Kingsolver’s book allowed me to really connect with some of the values our society holds at a high standard and why these are seemingly so important.  Kingsolver states in her book “It is both extraordinary and sympathetic in our culture to refrain from having everything one can afford.  Yet people do, mostly because they are allergic, or religious.  We looked around the table at one another, knowing we had our reasons too.  Strang, though, how much it felt like stepping into a spaceship and slamming the hatch,” (Kingsolver, p. 35).  I loved reading about her family living off the grid, and being able to connect this concept to my values as a person.  This unit helped me to connect with my values as an individual and conceptualize how these values were instilled in me, which also helped me with my final project.  This conceptualization helped me to achieve the course objective, finding my place in nature.  

Hunting Season

          Throughout the years it has been interesting to be born on the last day of rifle hunting season.  As a child I was bribed to celebrate my birthday early, and every year I delightfully agreed knowing this meant I got to open my presents and eat cake before my actual birthday.  To me, this was the only impact that hunting season had on me, but as I have grown older I have developed a stronger opinion about the event. 

            My dad’s side of the family owns 380 acres of land in Evart, Michigan a town that has a few gas stations, and just got a McDonalds in the last 10 years.  This land is absolutely gorgeous, and I am truly blessed to spend summers and falls walking throughout it.  We own a small cottage on this land, which has been kept in its original state, a wish of my Grandfather who believes technology ruins the impact nature has on us.  I tend to avoid this cottage during the later parts of fall as this is when my whole family piles in to spend their next few weeks hunting.   Hunting to me, seems silly being called a sport.  I can understand and respect people who hunt as a means for providing meat for their family.  What I do not understand is stuffing the heads of deer and mounting them on walls as a trophy or “conversation starter.”  How would you feel if deer hunted humans and stuffed their heads placing them on their living room mantels to act as conversation starters?  How about if you constantly had to be cautious when walking outside a month every year because deer might dress in clothes to match their surroundings and jump out shooting you?  It seems a little silly to me when reversed, which is where my frustration comes into play.  Killing something else, especially something that cannot defend itself is not and should not be considered a sport. 

A Trip in the Woods

There is something completely satisfying about sitting in a hot tub surrounded overhead by beautiful Oak trees.  Looking into the distance I can see a lush acre of greenery where deer sometimes wander.  Just beyond this is a forest of trees with a small stream running through them.  These trees have lost most of their leaves, but the ones that remain vary in shades of orange. I am fortunate enough to be set in this scene each fall when my parents open our hot tub.  Coming home this weekend I had no agenda besides studying, helping my sister with wedding plans, and relaxing from a stressful week.  These last few weeks have been jam packed with tests, papers galore, thesis preparation, and graduate school applications.  I have been overwhelmed and needed a weekend to go home and get away from everything.  When I heard that my parents opened our hot tub and heated it, I was beyond excited.  I jumped inside the tingly hot water, rested my head against the side, and admired this scene around me. 

I have honestly not ventured out into these woods in quite some time, especially since settling in Kalamazoo.  (I have also noticed that this class has basically forced me to consider all of the things that I have not experienced in nature since I was younger.)  I have planned on using these woods to shoot pictures for the children’s story I wrote for this class later this weekend.  I have written my children’s story based on these woods and the kids I babysit.  I called them this week asking them to go hike with me in the woods, so I can take the pictures that go along with the story.  After losing myself in this scene as I soak in hot water, I am probably as excited about this trip into the woods as the children I babysit.  

Sarcasm-Winter Style

Today I woke up, sleeping under a comforter, blanket, and sheets shivering cold having the realization that winter is approaching.  This feeling always puts me in a state of disgust.  I am not ready for this season, as it is my least favorite.  I am not ready for the struggle every morning to get out of a bed warmed by my heating blanket to step onto an ice cold wood floor.  I am not ready for the mornings I have to get up an extra twenty minutes to scrap the solid ice off my windshield and heat my car.  Most of all, I am definitely not ready for the stupidity of Michigan drivers sliding all over the road.

I am not the best driver by any means, but for some reason have been able to control my driving better then the majority of Michigan drivers each winter.  I am not sure why, but Michigan drivers seem to have amnesia on how to drive during the first snowstorm of each year.  Whoever thought it was a good idea to speed down a snowy road covered with black ice, jotting through the lanes of traffic, was sadly mistaken.  My other favorite is the car that appears to be a first-time driver in the snow, going 5 mph holding up all sorts of traffic.  These extremes seem to litter the road, causing numerous accidents throughout the season.  Then we have the gawkers of the accidents who decide to slam on their brakes to look at the crash, causing other accidents in the act.  So please winter, can we just skip the snow this season?

A Day at the Pumpkin Patch

            With the start of fall arriving my friend Sarah prompted the idea of going to a pumpkin patch.  I was hesitant about the idea since I had not been to a pumpkin patch since I was in elementary school.  I remembered the trips we used to take to the pumpkin patch every year in Montrose, Michigan.  My mother owned a daycare center and I remember the anticipation we all felt sitting in the back seat of the minivan on the drive there.  We knew our day would be filled with picking apples, and a pumpkin to later carve, getting homemade doughnuts, seeing the cider mill, and our absolute favorite, the wagon ride through the orchard.  The wagon ride went through a trail that had different scenes made out of pumpkins.  I distinctly remember the scene of pirates, the Disney scene, the Scooby-Doo scene, and different fairytale scenes.  In remembering all the excitement I felt as a child I decided it was a trip that was needed to get in the spirit of the fall season.  We headed out to the apple orchard on Gull Road in full excitement. 

            I felt like a small child revisiting these old memories as I jumped out of the minivan I now own, that I recall sitting in the back of year after year going to this joyous event.  It was a brisk, autumn day and I noticed the leaves beginning to change to a burnt orange on the trees surrounding us.  We decided our first stop in our day would be to jump on the wagon ride.   To be honest, this wagon ride was completely different and boring compared to the one I remember going on at Montrose Apple Orchard.  Granted there were not any pumpkin scenes, and I was ten years older, but I was completely unsatisfied with the ride.  Although the excitement was nowhere near what I felt as a child, I did spend the time in the wagon ride looking at the leaves changing and the corn fields that surrounded us.  We spent the other parts of our day eating homemade doughnuts and cider, picking our pumpkins we later carved, going through the corn maze, but the most significant part of the day was this wagon ride.  It was relaxing just to have this twenty minute ride to appreciate the changes in nature around us that would be staying for some time.

Vegetarian?

I cannot express how I excited I am for this unit we have started with Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  I had been looking forward to this since I saw it in the syllabus because of my own experience with becoming a vegetarian.   I had said when I signed up for this course that it would probably have a great impact on how I feel about staying vegetarian and ultimately if I will continue with the diet.  I was especially excited after our class discussion to find that Chris was a vegetarian for ten years and had raised her kids to have this diet as well.

My own becoming a vegetarian started about a year ago when I began experiencing severe health problems.  It came to a point where I was hospitalized because I had been unable to eat or drink anything for almost five days.  I had already been to a GI specialist who had diagnosed me with IBS, and gave me pills to help with symptoms.  It became clear that this diagnosis was incorrect when I was hospitalized.  My doctors were very confused at what was happening because I was a healthy nineteen year old who was active and practiced healthy eating habits.  I was ultimately diagnosed after almost two days in the hospital with gull bladder disease and had my gull bladder removed.  This diagnosis was a surprise to my family and me, but not to the doctors.  We found out that people at younger ages are having their gull bladders taken out at higher rates not due to bad diets as is generally the cause.  The doctors explained that because I had a healthy lifestyle, my gull bladder disease was caused by a combination of two things: the consumption of prescription medications and the steroids that are put in our seemingly healthy foods (mostly meats).  This was shocking to me, I was never a sickly person, so it was not like I had abused prescription medications by any means, and my parents had raised me on a very healthy diet. 

This causation spoke volumes to me about our society.  In our American society we thrive on money and the idea of time.  We are constantly racing one place to another, which is very different from other societies.  There was a large possibility that I was given prescription medications from my doctors for reasons that could have been cured without medications.  This over usage of prescription pads in the case of doctors generally happens to speed up the turnover of one patient to the next as well as the influence of the pharmaceutical companies to make more money.  Our food industry is set up in a very similar fashion where we are given meats that have such large amount of steroids in them that they are affecting our health, just to speed up the growing process of the animals and to make more money.  I love that Kingsolver has strong political undertones throughout her book about these issues that I feel have impacted my physical being so much.

After doing a large amount of research about gull bladder disease and our food industry I decided to go vegetarian.  My symptoms after the surgery went away faster and I feel like I am living a lifestyle that will be much healthier for me in the long run.  In a society of many people who do not understand why I have a diet such as this it is empowering to read about a family who went against the larger amount of society to live a healthier, greener lifestyle.

See Ya Michigan!

Maybe my disconnect with Michigan started when I was seven and my brother was pushing me down the hill on my sled and I ran head-on into a birch tree, or maybe when I was up north at our cottage and was the only kid out of eight cousins that couldn’t get in the tree house, or even on the bike ride from the Upper Tahquamenon Falls to the Lower when I threw my bike in a ditch and said I was done riding.  I am not sure when I became so set on leaving Michigan, but I have been dreaming of it for most of my life.  My mom had left Michigan and lived in San Francisco, California for about a year when she was in her twenties, and since I have heard about her experiences and seen the city itself I have known it is where I belong.  Reading and discussing Allison Swan’s book Fresh Water has made me realize that while I have spent so much of my life waiting to get out of Michigan, I have missed out on the state’s Great Lakes, four seasons, and its beauty.  I had no idea that the Great Lakes were the largest source of fresh water in the world, that statistic to me is astounding.

 Looking back on my experiences as a child, I was not deprived of nature by any means, in fact my parents went above and beyond spending family vacations and everyday events out in nature, no matter how much any of us resisted.  We spent summers on all of the Great Lakes, and have pictures of us swimming in each one.  We spent falls up north in the Upper Peninsula watching the leaves change.  We spent winters outside skiing and sledding.  We spent springs up north with our extended family in our cottage surrounded by the acres my Grandparents own.  Still through all of these experiences I have somehow been able to see past the natural beauty and been distracted by my selfish desire to leave this state.  Maybe it’s now time for me to reconnect.  Michigan may not be where I belong, but I cannot let that fact allow me to see past the beauty of where I grew up.

Reconnecting With Nature Experience

Along with this class I am taking the Honors College cluster class Environment, Technology and Values.  Taking these classes together is a great experience as I am able to connect different aspects of the two classes together, especially in writing.  I recently had an experience with this class that has inspired me to write a blog entry about it for this class.  Our teacher Sister Ginny scheduled a trip for us to go to the Transformations Spirituality Center on Nazareth’s Campus to take part in a program she wrote and has given classes in for years called Reconnecting with Nature.  I came into the experience wondering why I had to waste three hours sitting in nature on a Friday afternoon, but the experience was definitely one that changed my perspective of nature itself.  Sister Ginny began by giving us a map of the area that we would spending time in that afternoon and giving us some background on how the area came to be.  It was incredible to hear that she basically took this raw piece of land, created trails lined with planks and bridges, and planted greenery throughout most of her life.  I could not even imagine being able to see this area transformed over the years. 

When I was given the instructions that I would be spending the first half hour by myself in nature I was shocked and figured I would have to figure out a way to entertain myself for the time.  The idea of walking into nature by myself was astounding because as I started this half hour I could not even remember a time that I was in nature completely alone.   This first half hour went by so fast that I almost missed the time to meet back with the class.  It was very interesting to see what things I noticed while surrounded by nature entirely.  I found it to be extremely serene and that I felt at peace without any feeling of stress.  One thing that I noticed was the way the sun looked when it reflected off of different things found in nature.  This became very apparent to me when I got to what was called the babbling brook bridge and took a seat to watch the water.  It was very beautiful and peaceful to hear the sound of the water as I watched it rippling around in movement.  I remember feeling so stress free that when I got up from the babbling brook bridge and kept walking into the distance and heard the sound of traffic that I became annoyed that the outside noise was interfering with the sounds in nature.  Our class met up once again to discuss our experience before departing again for another half hour in nature by ourselves.  I took a different trail then I had the first time that ended up connecting with the trail I had been on the first time.  I actually ended up sitting back on the babbling brook bride again.  It was beautiful to watch the sand in the bottom of the brook move along with the water.  I ended up spending almost the full half hour back there at this spot again, and it was so peaceful that I felt at home in this spot.   Just being able to sit on this bridge for an hour took my stress away for the rest of the day.

My Porch

Starting a blog was very difficult for me, mostly because I have never even kept a diary or journal of any sort.  On top of that, I am not a very creative writer; I am used to writing lab reports, behavioral protocols, and assessments.  So the assignment to start a creative blog about my experiences in nature was not only difficult, but a little scary.  After a few weeks of procrastination, ideas of blogs thrown away, and nervousness I finally came up with a great exercise to get my brain flowing.  I live in an old house on South Park Street in Kalamazoo’s historic district, which I think I sometimes take for granted.  Living in this downtown area allows me to be surrounding be a lot more nature then the parking lots I was surrounding by in an apartment complex.  Not only am I surrounding by all of this beautiful scenery, but I have a beautiful porch to enjoy it from.   To some people a porch is no big deal, and often not used enough, but to me this porch is amazing.  I never had a porch attached to my house growing up, and I have always thought there is something serene about ending your day reading a book your porch as the sun sets.  So I have taken my laptop outside to sit on the porch, surrounding by nature, simply to observe the things around me. 

I think the fact that my house is placed on a rather busy street tends to make people forget how much nature we are still surrounded by.  Directly in front of my house is a beautiful tree with the richest color of red leaves I have seen in a long time.  I have no idea what kind of tree this is, because I know very little about trees, but this tree and its colors were mesmerizing enough that I stared at it and stop typing for 10 minutes.  Just taking the time to stop typing led me to start observing other parts of the nature around me.  The way the sun shines down through the red of the leaves in this tree is incredible and I have decided that I should eventually take pictures of this.  Our porch has a large bush of some sort that surrounds it on all sides.  This bush has thorns in it, which has always made me not want to even get near it, but when I took the time to actually look at the bush I realized it is beautiful.  The shape of the leaves along with the swirling of the thorns makes this bush an interesting maze of sorts. 

This exercise of literally just setting myself out in nature to write helped me enormously and has changed my perspective of the blogging assignment.  Not only do I have to be proud of myself for finishing my first journal entry of my life, but for coming up with lots of different ideas for blog entries.  The only downfall to taking my writing outdoors and observing nature around me is that I am now done blogging for the day to take a walk around observing some more.