12           four bees swarming

345         puffy dead leaves remain on the forest floor, decaying

6-12       running down a little slope, tripping

13-15     don't want to step on the little yellow flowers

16-20     I stepped on some flowers

21-26     step over a fallen branch

27-32     birkenstocks were not the right shoe choice

33-38     sunny spot, rays on my neck, feels good

39-45     SO MANY BEES. Why are people so afraid of bees? They mind their own business.

46-53     remember when this slope in front of me was all ice and treacherous?

54-59     now that everything's green, there's not a clear path

60-68     should have brought a sweater with me

Because life has been crazy (thank you tech week!), I realize I didn't get a chance to post when I missed class last Thursday, and since it's probably not much help to go back and post about my reactions to the rest of "The Unspoken Hunger" at this point, instead I thought I'd say a little bit about the talk I missed class for, since some of the things I observed/experienced tied really directly into our discussion the other day about writing and speaking behing apprehendable vs. not being challenging. I was thinking on this further a few days later in relation to the event I spoke at, and I had some more thoughts. The event I spoke at was a banquet for a bunch of middle school and high school science fair winners in Lancaster, PA.

Hey guys,

Marian, Abby and I are going to do a dance/ theater workshop for the teach in. It should take between 15 and 20 minutes. It will be a mixture of theater warm ups and exercises, contact improvisation, and group trust/ connection activities. It should be a lot of fun! 

Thanks,

Ariel

P.S. we would like to go first if at all possible...and in doors would be much preferred :) 

The wind whispers its wistful chill. Pink glades of light squeeze in-between the crevices of the stoic trees. Grounded in this root canal, I feel strangely distant. Unsettled. When I loaded the photographs I took of the site I am at, iPhoto asked me to identify the two “unnamed” figures in one of my photographs and another unnamed figure in a different photograph, and two unnamed figures in a third. It was a blurry, out-of-focus picture, but I could not help think about how we determine what it means to be human and that the computer possibly indicated a more fluid definition. My computer, something people produced, recognized similarities that I had overseen. I searched for a correlation between the pictures, but I could not find one. 

Dear Trees,
Thank you for swaying. 

Dear Grass,
Thank you for re-growing.

Dear Geese,
Thank you for leaving.

Dear Sky,
Thank you for being ever-changing.

Dear Clouds,
Thank you for appearing.

Dear Balcony,
Thank you for exisiting.

This time (for the first time), I took someone else with me who was experiencing a number of emotions. I've taken someone to my site sit before, but it was purely for photography purposes, not to make them feel better. This time, my friend had been having an incredibly rough day/week and I wanted to spend time with her in a place I knew I wasn't going to be disturbed by a crowd of other people. She's someone who has a ton of trouble displaying emotions and tends to bottle them up, so the fact that she wanted to talk to me and share something with me on her own free will concerned me.

Interesting read in Wired:

http://www.wired.com/2015/04/tracy-chou/

"The actual numbers I’ve seen and experienced in industry are far lower than anybody is willing to admit," she wrote. "This means nobody is having honest conversations about the issue."

Class started later because people were eating  and my meeting instructions were confusing and last minute . Many had to sit on the floor. We began the class by talking about people’s discomfort with silence. Then we moved on to the topic of consensus. We were conflicted the other day by wanting to respect people’s wishes, moving forward with the class agenda, so we could talk about what we read and other issues, and the importance of efficiency.

In reflecting on whar Freya Mathews says about our need for an "attentive love" for the world, I want to use our learning in this class to tangibly engage with the world in multiple ways. One idea is to begin to learn the names of the beings we live among by doing a guided plant walk around Morris Woods near English House. The walk facilitators would research plants before the walk and incorporate parts of our readings as theoretical maps. We would walk and see, feel, touch, smell, listen to (and taste?) the life around us, while situating ourselves in the wider scope (scape?) of interconnected things.