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.