Rochelle W.'s blog

The air feels like the snap of a pea, or a sharp knife going straight through a head of iceberg lettuce this evening. The longer I stay inside of if the more I enjoy it. The bees are not here anymore. Maybe they are finished with the tree wearing the coat of vines, or maybe they don't like the cut of the knife. Without the bees, and without the breeze the backyard of the English House is much more still than it was last week. Except for the trees shedding death. Also, I am much taller than I was last week. Standing on one of the long benches beside the picnic table I try and face the trees without arching my neck backward. But although I am taller today, there is still an arch in my neck.

When I came to the backyard of the English House today I didn't feel very much like attending to my environment, I felt more like attending to myself. I kept looking at the ground and only thinking about me. But I was aware I was doing this, so I made myself change, and by the end I was able to be more outwardly focused.

This morning at the English House I was drawn to the perimeter -- where the grass meets the woods, and the building. And I found today that what stood out to me were objects and bodies in motion. This was because mostly everything was still (except with the aid of this wind). So when something moved on it's own it caught my eye.

I encountered two eye catching events of movement.
First was the floating spinning leaf.

Spinning occured around, and around, and again. 

The second was a lot of bees. 

The bees surrounded the entire tree. 

Working up and down. Gathering and back again.

While I was walking around the perimeter of the backyard of the English house I was tempted to go into the woods. But I reminded myself that my place was in the backyard of the English house and not in the woods. I felt slightly stuck.

Cannot move out. 

Upon arrival in the backyard of the English house I assessed my seating options. The first option that caught my eye was a lightly colored jagged rock, which did not seem like the best option. Next I saw a stool, a lone bench, and a picnic table with one bench on either side. I sat one the lone bench without considering the grass or the stones embedded in the grass.

I didn’t really have a plan for my time here. So for a large portion of the time I sat and thought about what I should do. I felt like I needed an activity or an experiment to do so that I would be able to write my reflection thoughtfully.

So I came up with a plan: I would sit with my eyes closed. Vision seems to be the most prized of the five senses. It is the way I primarily and consciously analyze the the world around me on a daily basis. It’s the sense I used when I entered the space to analyze my sitting options. It’s my default sense. So to cut off vision would be to cut off the safety-net sense, and it would force me to analyze the world though a different lense.

When I visited Bryn Mawr for the first time and for the second time I was given a campus map so that I could find my way around. And at some point in the seemingly constant stream of mail from Bryn Mawr over the summer I got another map. At that time the pictorial map of the campus was one of the most accurate image representations of Bryn Mawr that I had come across. And for the first few days on campus that continued to be the truth. Now that I have been here for a few weeks, and now that I have been prompted to think about it more deeply, I have come to realize that this map can only represent one layer of Bryn Mawr (as any map can only represent one layer of what it is depicting).
The place that I am going to visit each week is the space behind the English house (the backyard of the English house?). There were some shiny leaves there the last time I went and I liked them very much. This spot is connected to the pictorial campus map because it is on the map, but it isn't labeled.

I had done an assignment similar to this one in my senior year of highschool, where I was told to go out and experience something new and write an essay about it. That assignment was not difficult for me and so I thought this one wouldn’t be either. But it turns out that this assignment was difficult for me. I think the reason lies in one key difference - I wasn’t writing while I was walking ( for my high school assignment I wrote while I was experiencing the new experience). I think the point of this assignment was to experience the walk fully, and then to separately write about it. I found it hard to separate the walking from writing about (or preparing to write about) the walking. I found it necessary to take notes while I walked, but also found that note taking pulled my attention away from the present, and pushed it into the future where I would be sitting down to write. I wonder if it is possible to fully experience something while at the same time trying to document it. For now I think the answer is that it is not possible. 

My essay differed from Thoreau's in that I wasn’t urging anyone to go out for a walk, or trying to convince the reader that walking is a necessary part of life. Instead I was writing about my thoughts and experiences from one particular walk. My walk differed from a Thoreauvian walk in that I was unable to completely escape from my obligations to society. They clung to me and I clung to them.

Rankings of where I felt happiest:

1. The English House

2. Morris Wood

3. Dalton Stair Case

4. Park 20

5. Campus Center Parking Lot

For the Plants:

1. Morris Wood