EcoLit 313

The image I selected is from the Sound of Music – it’s that moment when Maria is bounding into a field, arms spread, singing, feeling completely free… right before she realizes that she’s super-late for something back at the convent and sprints off back down the hill (goddamn bell!)

 Forground/Background based on this image: I chose this picture because, for me, it represents emotional highs and lows based on location. In the background, there’s the unseen convent – a place related of worry, awareness of responsibilities, commitments, etc. But in the foreground, there is a sense of freedom, carelessness, and anticipation – perhaps Maria has been planning to go for this walk, looking forward to it, much like I look forward to my sources of freedom on campus. And of course, there is the challenge of the climb, which I think is a good symbol for life at Bryn Mawr. 

I’m trying to accentuate the positive right now, let that positivity foreground my vision of Bryn Mawr (and I think visiting my on-campus site, the area around Arnecliffe Art Studio, will be a space of freedom). But honestly, sometimes it feels like a convent, so many tight corners and obligations.

So. In my google search for images of the campus, I found this site. These images don't represent the campus for me (though I did make the "Bryn Mawr Bubble" connection while I was looking at the Toroidial colony), so this post is just for fun.

I love that NASA validated this dream-world. I did a little more searching and found out that NASA hosts this contest every year -

It does not seem like there is a point in my day in which I go on a “proper” Thoreauvian walk; in fact, it does not seem that many places around me offer the possibility of walking without guided action.  It was thus hard to imagine a free-roaming meander, a saunter, a true meditative exploration on the outskirts of University City. After all, every step you took has you along another path that someone has created specifically to lead you to McDondalds or Chipotle or the UPenn Library; down Locust Walk, where it is almost permissible to saunter, bikes zoom past you while sorority girls and frat boys drunkenly bop shoulders and shrill like windchimes. Between destinations your head needs to be up and perceptive; they key in this sentence is the assurance that one must always have a destination while walking; an aimless amble could put you in danger and lead you into the wrong type of situation.    

            As I was about to begin my Thoreauvian walk around the Bryn Mawr campus, I considered briefly examining a map of the campus so I could get a better sense of where my walk might take me. But as I considered whether or not to do so, I thought back to how Thoreau described the Saunterers of the Middle Ages. Thoreau describes the Saunterers as wanderers whose intentions were to reach the Holy Land but were not bound to the final goal of reaching the Holy Land and rove and idly take their time in doing so. Unlike, the Saunterers I was not trying to get to one particular destination but like them I was perfectly content with wandering, soaking in the campus landscape and taking my time in doing so. Examining a map, I concluded, would conflict with the point of this walk because doing so would give a set idea of what I could expect on this walk of campus, rather than letting my own sauntering and exploration give me a sense of what the Bryn Mawr campus had to offer me. As a Haverford student, with the exceptions of the dining halls, and the locations of various classes and events I attended, I wasn’t as familiar with the campus as a Bryn Mawr student or faculty member who knew exactly what the campus had to offer.  But because I had little knowledge of the campus, I had what Thoreau described as “useful ignorance”, in the sense that because I had no extensive knowledge of the majority of the campus and thus everything that I came across would seem new and fresh.

           In order to walk through Bryn Mawr like Thoreau, I began at the center. I felt that as locating the center was an objective of mine, I could not let a predetermined destination interfere with the way nature wanted to take me. Nature was guiding me. Nothing else should be guiding me. Following Thoreau, I wanted to be guided unconsciously by “nature’s subtle magnetism” rather than by an end point. A walk should have no purpose or destination, so I set out on my sauntering walk to see where the walk took me.

When Henry David Thoreau wrote in “Walking,” “How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand it I do not know; but I have ground to suspect that most of them do not STAND it at all,” he must have been referring to Mawrtyrs. We have a keen ability to sit in hard chairs all day, perhaps in their carrels in Canaday or Carpenter or around a table in a classroom, pouring over textbooks or activating Serendip. And this is not always a choice because of the pure rigor of our environment. (Welcome to senior year.) We tend to exercise our minds more than our legs. And often, we our brains are so exhausted that when we do walk, it is the distance from our desks to our beds.

Since today is Sunday, a day free of classes, I decided to take a break from my studies and meander across campus. Bryn Mawr truly is beautiful, especially in the sunshine. All jokes aside, I love talking walks around campus and do it often: to clear my mind, to be freed from the Internet and my vastly growing collection of academic articles, to simply revel in the splendor of greenery on Senior Row, behind Ermdan, or in front of Rhoads. I also enjoy gazing at the bold and beautiful buildings of Bryn Mawr. Thoreau writes, “Then it is that I appreciate the beauty and the glory of architecture, which itself never turns in, but forever stands out and erect, keeping watch over the slumberers.” I can say the same.