Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

Reply to comment

Alison Cook-Sather's picture

Living Landscapes



I have been thinking about how people, as much as any other natural element, create and contribute to the landscapes we live in. Paul was a deep force of nature — strong, quiet, insistent on life. He was one of the first people to welcome me to Bryn Mawr. And I mean welcome: to greet me, to invite me into conversation, to affirm my place in the landscape. That was 17 years ago, and so to lose Paul feels like losing something that should always be there (Sandy’s giant Copper Beach). I keep remembering – and not comprehending – that he is gone. And so I am comforted by his words (thanks, Anne, for surfacing them) that we might "come to see disappearance not as loss but rather as transformation… joyful acknowledgement that what has lived beside us now lives inside us." Paul certainly lives inside me, and when I lit a candle for him and placed it, at dusk on the day he died, among the bright red poppies that fill the fields here in England, I thought of how Paul welcomed so many not only into the landscape of Bryn Mawr but into our own interior landscapes, making us at home in both.

Reply

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
To prevent automated spam submissions leave this field empty.
8 + 7 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.