EcoLit ESem

Ahh who ever thought sitting down could be so restless trying to avoid the rain covered seat. I feel like a biirdy on a perch trying to mimic my fellow birdies in the area. When in fact they are actually silent. Is this not a chipper day? The dark clouds overcast, the bone chilling cold blowing through my jacket. This is quite a lovely day for me! I breath in through my noise and as the cold air enters my lungs it causes me to cough and clear my throat. I like the feeling of my toes vibrating everytime I wiggle them as the sharpe jolts of pain shoot around my foot.  I cannot be happier as I hear the acorns dropping all around me and wonder if one will make its way down onto my head. Kerplunk! Oh wait, that landed next to me. I enjoy giving up my comfort to sit on the top of the bench instead of letting my butt get drenched. I enjoyed trying a more comedic approach to nature because us as humans always seem so uncomfortable when we go outside our comfort zone and cannot get comfortable. So I thought I would play on that uncomfotableness and make it humerous since we all experience it.

Rain. Much colder, getting colder. I came to campus to swim, but the open swim is closed (that's what I'm told, in those words!) so that volley ball players can use all the locker rooms. (Thanks a bunch, Claire and Zoe!) So, to the labyrinth, with the intention of going deeper. Slower, deeper. Stepping into deep dreaming space, circling towards union. Greet the beech tree first: the "three ladies" are hugely bigger than I remember them: my photographs, which I've been looking at all week, have no reference for scale, and make them look small, graceful, like normal size tree trunks. In fact they are huge and graceful. The trunk of this tree is enormous, much thicker than one would expect from the overall profile of the tree. In my paper I compared these three trunks to my grandmother, my mother, and me. Does their surprising size tell me something about us, our deceptive, unobvious size and power? I sneak a wilderness pee under the shelter of the tree's hanging branches. No one around, no one watching, but I feel illicit, get away with it.

Going deeper already, I sense/imagine down into the earth, the curve of the hill, picturing/feeling grass over earth over rock.

...for a structured program of "storytelling integrated with mapping" caught my attention. We are not engaged, in this class, in "digital learning" on anything like this scale, but I do think our two small field trips upcoming--"back in time" to the farm from BMC was made, and then "further back in time" to understand the geological formations on which our cultural explorations sit--are akin to this project of "telling the historia of the environment":

Please see below for information on a NITLE webinar that may be of interest. I will be arranging a group viewing here on campus; please contact me if you are interested. You can also register and watch from your own computer using the link below. (Bryn Mawr College is a member of NITLE.)

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Stories of the Susquehanna:  Digital Humanities, Spatial Thinking, and Telling the historia of the Environment

I have some reflection on the exercise that we took turn to read our Sunday online post in the class today. A lot of us did pictures last week, and we didn’t have a chance to look at them but listened to excerpted words. Nevertheless, I found many of those words very visual and vivid. I felt I saw the objects that were described by listening to the words - the spinning leaves and the deep far sky… And they left me such a deep impression, which I don’t think would have been achieved by reading those words. Because when we read, alphabets are what we first see, and it requires a second process of creating a visual impression. Moreover, I don’t think it is only language (the descriptive words that are being used) that is contributing to deepening an image in my mind. I could not have seen those images if I haven’t experienced them myself. For example I wasn’t able to see the circus rehearsal so vividly because I wasn’t there. My brief reflections are 1) it helps to  grasp a literal idea if I move my eyes off the text from time to time; 2) in this case languages served to record one’s own experience and evoke other’s similar experience and it is more effective if the reader/listener have similar experience.

...the cartoon Alison Bechdel drew on the blackboard in the English House lecture hall,
during her Q&A session last Thursday:

This week I decided to approach my spot on the campus in a new way. I wanted to do an illustrated representation of the moon bench, and look at it from a different perspective. Usually when I sit in the moon bench I look down senior row, it is a beautiful view but it is not the only view. Today I sat facing the moon bench and it gave me a different feel for the space. I noticed the "mini forest" behind the bench, and after I did my sketch and added color, I realized how ugly it is compared to the beautiful green, gold, and brown colors that surround it. Looking at the moon bench this way gave me a new appreciation for it. It provides a wonderful view of the campus, but the bench itself is not so beautiful. Even the golden glow cast by the sun did nothing to enhance the bench, it remained cold, and gray, and stone. The life aroud it however lit up, and interacting with the wind and the sun. Overall, I enjoy sitting on the moonbench to appreciate the surrounding nature, but the bench appears to me to be distinctly out of place among the beauty that surrounds it. I wonder what it will look like in the winter, will the enviornment take on similar qualities of the bench?