I was surprised by this week’s GORP, presented by Shawn. I realized I had been to the beach that Shawn discussed – Black’s Beach, a nude beach in San Diego. In class, we discussed how nude beaches are often secluded. They offer a zone of truer freedom. Perhaps they are maintained or treated differently by beach-goers in terms of littering? Ginny proposed that the beaches might even be an example of the necessity of nature that Walden discusses. The class also discussed the different ways that beaches (and swim suits) are used – from tanning to swimming.

I have since reflected on my own experience at nude beaches and what they demonstrate in terms of human relationship with nature. This past summer, I went to a nude beach on Sauvie Island outside of Portland, Oregon. The idea of nude beaches that is most compelling to me was stated well by Professor Smith. He mentioned that people think of presenting themselves in a certain way in nature – wearing certain clothes (often expensive gear) that are “necessary” for a certain activity.

I thought about how the reading “Living Like Weasels” applied to this discussion. Annie Dillard states, “I would like to learn, or remember, how to live…I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice” (287).

Perhaps it is at nude beaches that we see and experience such a powerful form of mindlessness and living in necessity. We shed our clothes, the way we design ourselves, and present ourselves to the world. We enter a place free of the typical social constraints and enter a place where it is okay to be naked in front of strangers and friends. We expose ourselves fully to the world and allow all of our skin to feel the sand and the water. Perhaps it is in a moment like this that we are remembering how to live – embracing the space around us and ourselves. We abandon a world of constraints and judgment.

My nude beach experiences are so disconnected from other aspects of my life due to the mindlessness the space produces. This is why realizing someone else I know had experienced that space felt so strange to me.

I am always on the go. As soon as I complete a task or adventure, I look for the next. I dread sitting still, remaining in one place, moving too slowly, and moving without purpose. I always have a goal in mind and this is why I struggle to see. Annie Dillard’s “Seeing” and John Stilgoe’s “Outside Lies Magic” eloquently explain the phenomenon of truly seeing and experiencing nature. Dillard discusses the struggle “to gag the commentator” (34). I now strive “to hush the noise of useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing just as surely as a newspaper daggled before my eyes” (34). I hadn’t before thought of experiencing nature in this way. Without internal commentary – just seeing what is before me. I suppose a meaningful experience in nature doesn’t always have to be associated with profound thoughts and technical commentary. Sometimes, I need to simply see.

I  know I am missing out as I move so quickly. My experiences in the outdoors all involve some goal, whether it is summiting a mountain, reaching a certain distance, cardiovascular exercise, climbing a rock face, paddling to a location in the lake. I hope to apply the advice of Stigloe. He states, “Go outside, move deliberately, then relax, slow down, look around. Do not jog. Do not run. Forget about blood pressure and arthritis, cardiovascular rejuvenation and weight reduction. Instead pay attention to everything…Walk. Stroll. Saunter…Explore” (1). I am a prime example of a poor explorer. I do not move without purpose or a plan. I fear of getting lost and I typically follow a set trail or a leader. Stigloe explains, “Ordinary exploration begins in casual indirection, in the juiciest sort of indecision, in deliberate, then routine fits of absence of mind” (9). I long to explore as I have rarely, or possibly never, done before – drifting mindlessly forward. Stigloe’s call for exploration is an essential way of seeing as Dillard describes.

A recent experience I had running with a friend through the neighborhoods and hills surrounding Lafayette was a clear example of my failure to see. It took experiencing my regular running route with a friend with fresh eyes and a unique perspective for me to truly see the trail and all that surrounded me. I plan to expand on this experience and these ideas in my response paper.

http://https://www.ted.com/talks/birke_baehr_what_s_wrong_with_our_food_system?language=en

Birke Baehr was 11 years old when he delivered this TED talk. Notice how fantastic of a speaker he is. Notice how inspired he is and how much he inspires the audience. Notice his youthful humor alongside his mature wisdom. Is he a prodigy? Was he born with an uncanny ability to understand the world around him and concern himself with its massive problems? Perhaps. I would like to point out, however, that he is road schooled (in the video he says home-schooled, but his TED biography uses the more accurate term).

Birke has been traveling the country for the past 5 years visiting organic farms. He’s broadened his classroom to an entire nation and has become incredibly successful in his activism because of it. I also get the sense that he feels fulfilled by what he does. I thought of him and his unschooling/roadschooling a lot while reading “The Wilderness of Childhood”, “Outside Lies Magic”, and “There Was A Child Went Forth.” In the video, Birke immediately points out that he feels children in his generation are easily manipulated by cooperations via TV ads and public school. Maybe if we raised children with the principles highlighted in the two essays such as enhancing ones awareness of the world around them and abandoning structure and supervision, they would be less susceptible to the influences of advertisement. If society was more in tune with children’s impressionability, as is highlighted in the Whitman poem, would we still send kids out into the world with no tools to see past the veil of colorful advertisement? Even if it meant we could save our food system and prevent those children from developing health issues early on?

I do believe there is a strong correlation between Birke’s ability to see past the structure and marketing of our society and his schooling. By being roadschooled, Birke saw the farms of the country. He stepped in the mud shared by pigs. He breathed in the air full of pollution, in some areas, and totally void of it in others. He got to experience what real people are doing all over the world to try to fix our food system. What I’m saying, and what I think the authors of these three pieces would agree with, is that it doesn’t take a genius kid to understand the problems of the world and begin to work towards solving them. It takes the ability for that kid to go out into the world and experience it instead of seeing it on a screen.

I personally remember how much I hated the structure of public schooling. I felt that I had more to do with what interested me, but my time was taken up by a bunch of formalities and requirements. If I had been unschooled, what could I have done? Would I have accomplished more by now? Would I now be less jaded about society if I had been exposed to a more free kind of learning? Perhaps if I have children one day, I’ll school them on the road, in the world, with self-guided structure and spontaneity. Then maybe they wont have to be told that the food system is unsustainable, they’ll discover it for themselves.

Beginning the semester with our first ‘Ramble’, we strolled across campus looking at examples of nature integrated on campus. On our stop at Kirby, we noted the tributes to nature on the exterior and interior of the building.

The building itself, constructed in the peak of the depression, is an expression of Kirby’s economic clout and general excess. Also, as we mentioned in class, the building is an expression of constructed nature. The building, in my opinion, actually celebrates nature and symbolizes these aspects that Kirby wanted to convey. You see leaf shaped ornaments sculpted and carved in the building adding to the aesthetic beauty. Two birds, an owl and eagle, can be seen in the front of the building. The owl represents the wisdom that comes from knowledge acquired within. The eagle, celebrates dominance and power that can come from wealth.

It’s ironic, then, that a building that a building that was created with the purpose of showing off personal wealth and social standing also celebrates nature, which doesn’t requires nothing to appreciate.

“Each man is the architect of his own fortune”, is an old latin idiom, carved into the marble around the top of the building and the Kirby building celebrates his fortune through natural architecture.

Nature is all around, but to truly define it would mean to acknowledge nature as a singular entity. Nature encompasses all elements of the world, whether entirely natural or wholly manmade. It is the place in which we live and thrive, and so the ideal definition would describe nature as a place to offer belonging, which could be some place uniquely magical for everyone. Such a sentiment to belong in the world in which one lives is incredibly significant.

Whitman would likely agree with nature existing as a place of belonging, as evidenced by his poem There was a Child went Forth. The piece explores a child’s formative encounters with the world, including those with plants and animals, city and country folk, his own parents, and everyday clouds. As Whitman concludes, “these became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day.” The child of this poem has gone through life always a part of something, continuously being shaped by his experiences. The interactions with boys both friendly and quarrelsome, with the fresh innocence of the mare’s foal and the cow’s calf, with “the sense of what is real” in affection from his family, and with the horizon’s edge and “the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud” all left a note-worthy impact. Through these daily, lifelong connections, the child may develop as a member of the world in which he lives. All people have observations and experiences of their own, from which they develop to truly become themselves.

Becoming is a continual process as shown through a child’s consciousness throughout his life. This idea of becoming oneself or one with nature comes from a place unique and magical to each individual being.

When prompted to consider our favorite place in nature and what it meant to us, I was at once flooded with images and ideas of the lovely scenes and spots I visit and cherish. Above all things in this world, I love the Atlantic Ocean, so it came to mind first. But for perhaps the first time in my life, I felt this was a cop-out.

This summer I went on a 17 day road trip with my boyfriend Sacha (Lafayette ’14). For 14 of the nights we had little more than a general idea (think, state-at best) of where we would be setting up camp, and all in all we drove about 5,500 miles, visited 6 national parks, saw 12 states, and stayed in 14 different locations. It was a wonderful trip full of beauty that I will undoubtedly write about in future blog posts, but to get back to my original intention here, I will write about one night in particular that will stay with me as long as I live as a testament to the majesty of the skies.

Sacha lives in Minnesota, and when I am not at Lafayette, I live in New Hampshire, so we are always a plane ride apart. When it is frustrating or saddening not to be together, one of us will usually remind the other to look up to the sky because despite our distance from each other, we’re looking up at the same stars, the same sun, the same moon. A little cheesy, I know, but it helps.

So one of the nights on our adventure we wound up in Death Valley National Park well beyond the appropriate hour to get one’s tent situated for the night. We got our tent up around 9:30pm whilst baking in the 105 degree temperatures at Furnace Creek Campground, 190 feet below sea level. If this weren’t already wild enough, the desert winds were so strong, they threatened to blow our tiny tent away every time we left it for more than a moment (the ground was too solid to stake it in). We were comically out of place. After a solid effort of maybe five minutes trying to sleep in our tent-oven, we engineered ourselves some more refreshing sleeping quarters by pulling two campground tables together, head to head, and laid under the stars.

The sky that night is unrivaled and unparalleled by any other I’ve ever seen. I cherish the relative visibility of a starry sky in rural New Hampshire, but this felt like another world. The expanse of the black and the clarity of the visually unpolluted stars was so humbling. I have scarcely felt so small. It feels cheap to leave it at this, but it was incredible.

Despite its magnificence, I don’t know that I could consider Death Valley among my favorite places. But that moment, I can. Head to head on that table, Sacha and I looked up at the same sky together, and it was a better place than any I could imagine the next time we look up from afar.

I think the meaning I take from a moment like that is the inspiring massiveness of nature in this country. I have certainly taken for granted my ability to walk in the woods, or play at the beach, or hike a mountain at will when I’m home, but only in these recent experiences have I realized the different levels of nature, and the inspiring beauty of the actual “wild”. I feel compelled to share these experiences with others because I think they are at the core of who we as a social breed should be. Life often moves too fast, and it is the places in nature alone that can truly slow it down.

To me, the most interesting part about our ramble through campus looking at nature was the lines. At our first stop at the pollinator garden, all of the plants were arranged in straight lines. Everything looked beautiful, and there was enough spacing for each plant to get adequate sunlight and water. The arrangement was pristine, and perfectly arranged for a college campus which is why it was located in a very central location on campus.Similarly, the flowers and other nature imagery on the Kirby Hall of Civil rights were all arranged in straight lines. There were clear patterns to follow while walking around the building.

Then we arrived to the edge of campus.  To the place with a rusty fence and litter on the ground. When looking over the fence, a broken television and some power lines were visible. The area had not received the same attention to detail that the pollinator garden and Kirby Hall of Civil Rights had received. Yet, what was aesthetically pleasing to me was the messiness of the area. All of the plants were growing over each other. They were fighting for sunlight and water. They were fighting to survive. Or sometimes even coexisting, like the poison ivy growing its way up the trunk of a tall tree. Despite all of the litter that was not present elsewhere on the ramble, this area felt more like real nature to me because nothing was in a straight line.

While on our ramble on campus the other day I realized there were elements of nature right in front of my face that I had not noticed before. I found the portion of the excursion in which we observed and analyzed Kirby Hall of Civil Rights left me with lingering questions and thoughts.

This was so fascinating to me because never had I really considered nature would have an influence on a manmade structure that ultimately supplants nature. Furthermore, I had somehow managed to never notice nature had an influence on a building right here on campus that I walk by nearly everyday. From the numerous animals and branches on the elaborate entrance to the decorative flowers on columns in the foyer and a strange stack of acorns carved into the marble above an interior doorway, I began to wonder why images of nature make their way into the manmade world.

It is clear nature has influenced the manmade world, but I found myself wondering what motivates this incorporation of nature into manmade structure? Is this motivation due to the symbolism we find in certain aspects of nature, to their aesthetically pleasing elements, to a combination of the two, or to something else entirely? While during our rambling I found some of the embellishments of nature incorporated to be symbolic and some to be decorative, but I wonder if there was more symbolism or purpose to the things I overlooked or marked off as decorative features. Not only is this symbolism and use of nature in the manmade world something I want to better understand, but it is also something I think I will be much more conscious of from here on out.

Here are some more examples I found while exploring online!

https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/showcasing/women-architects/