Sunset

          On a rare warm October night, I stand facing the horizon. Two large pines frame the view, creating the perfect canvas for a beautiful Virginia sunset. The sky is scattered with thin clouds and a lone moon.     The sun hangs just above the horizon dominating the sky, casting the landscape with its orange and yellow hues.

          The sun drops, dipping its toes into darkness. The sun is an artist, the sky his canvas, the light his paint. The artist changes his palate. Orange and yellow give way to pink and peach. He paints the clouds mango and the landscape ruby.

          Opposite the sunset, the sky darkens, neglected by the painter. The atmosphere is a gradient of light and darkness, orange and navy. Almost as if the sun is letting its canvas be erased, the darkness advances.

          Long shadows fill the forest. Darkness overtakes where the sun’s brush cannot reach. Dark places aren’t seen, felt, smelled, or heard; only darkness is present. Lit spots shine vibrant colors, painted by the artist. Dark spots are just empty spaces, uncolored by light.

          The sun falls out of view, signaling the end of day and the beginning of night. The sky is navy blue. The moon and stars are the only painters now. They paint only in silver, creating gloomy portraits. The gloominess gives a sense of relaxation that doesn’t come in the daylight hours. It forces a yawn and makes my eyes grow heavy with sleep.

           I walk back to dorm in peace. 

~ Peter Ellis

Darkness

          My plan was to watch the sunrise, but I soon realized that it would be a while before that was going to happen, if at all. There was no orange glow on the horizon that is the sure sign of a rising sun. Nonetheless, I chose to lie down and look at the sky. I put away my phone completely for the first time that morning. The glow of a screen and beam of the flashlight were gone. Darkness flowed over the landscape around me, silently and slowly drowning everything in its path, casting a deep shadow on the earth. And yet this overwhelming force is not moving without resistance.

          In the distance, across the foggy haze of the pasture, stand a few street lights. A product of mankind, artificial electric light, familiar light.  They tear a deep scar in the reign of darkness. Sharp beams and rays cut and slash everything in their path, valiantly defending one of light’s new strongholds from the cold dead of night. Yet as I lay in my patch of grass, I feel far away from this battle.  Darkness swims at my feet, in and out of the tufts of grass, tugging at my extremities. To my right and to my left it weaves through the tree line. Faint, greyscale outlines are the only distinction between trees and empty space.

          Throughout history, humans have used the dark to describe the least heavenly places. I can see from where they came. In this utter darkness, life seems to be seeping out of every pore. The air’s energy whisked away with the sunset. Every breath stings a little.  My body and mind shiver in the cold.. Leaves rustle and twigs snap to my left. Noises without face or form finally move away. Every sound in this barren landscape is crisp and clear, and the slightest whisper shatters utter silence. By now I’m pretty tired of lying in the same position, I close my eyes. After a few deep breaths I open them up again.

          The night sky is amazing. Very seldom do we get to simply take time and look at the stars. Massive balls of hydrogen gas swirl in blistering heat. And in the center of these little light bulbs in outer space reside the origin of life. Everything that has ever existed has been inside a star at one point or another. It all begins with hydrogen atoms, colliding to make helium and, in doing so,  producing energy for the universe. Photons of light fly off in every direction. Only a select few of these light beams reach my retina. Traveling and battling through years of darkness, they light up the night sky. It’s refreshing to look up on a clear night and gaze in wonderment. A portrait of war hangs on the ceiling of the earth at night. Endless conflicts like the one across the pasture larger and further away than I can imagine. Stars hundreds of times larger than our sun spin endlessly in space engaging in battles of their own. 

          Seeing the stars above I am reminded that that light was fighting for existence all around me.  Light is certain to reappear and dominate this landscape again at sunrise, pumping warmth, life and energy into everything it touches and signaling the beginning of a new day. 

~ Brendan Foster

Noises

          The clouds move across the sky much faster than normal. Brown and green leaves rustle in the treetops, as the wind whistles throughout the sky. Some of the leaves fall, while others rustle.  

          The wind whistles and it reminds me of the playing of a harmonica. The wind constantly changes pitches,  sometimes sounding like a squealing cat. Coming and going in waves, it rushes through the sky, around every tree and obstacle. Not only can I hear the wind, but I can also feel its presence.

          The rustling leaves are a direct result of the wind. They imitate the steady riff of an acoustic guitar. The guitar, like the harmonica, is sporadic. The leaves crackle, shake, and stir, giving life to the song. Their motion is never-ending. I can hear their presence. The guitar strings are scraped and plucked.

          The two instruments are each other’s counterparts. They unite to create the song of nature.  This would not be possible with just one of the instruments:   guitar and harmonica  together, creating one unified piece of music.

         The calming music flows through one ear, and out the other. I find myself humming along to the beat. 

~ Henry Hartmann

Shapeshifter Wind

          Shrouded by shadows, I stand amidst trees. The clouded sky provides little light. The quiet woods lack the usual buzzing of insects, chirping, and warbling. Fallen  leaves crunch as I find a  root to sit on. I firmly grasp my sweater and clench my teeth as a cool wind glides through the forest. 

          The wind sounds like a small whisper. It speaks to me like a mysterious spirit that roams the earth. The wind is an elderly man. His voice makes his presence known, but he doesn’t try to demand attention from everyone. He gives guidance with his gruff, but soft voice. People may choose to heed his words or ignore them. The wise man tries to speak to as many people as he can, but like an orphaned dog in the streets, he receives momentary attention by some passerby who stops for only mere seconds.

          As quickly as the old man arrived, he left. A moment of silence settles: an eerie calm before a storm.

         The wind begins to howl and echo through the woods. The wind yells at me to wake up as if I’m in bed and my  mother is tearing my blanket off. “There’s no time to waste,” she says. But I don’t want to wake up; I’d rather stay asleep in my warm, comfortable bed. I smother myself in blankets as the wind roars around me like ocean tides surrounding a ship in distress. Again and again, waves crash down on the helpless boat. Finally, the storm clears. The wind returns, whistling softly like a flute, coaxing me to wake up. From underneath my covers, I open my eyes and finally sit up. The wind resumes its usual gliding. I don’t want to be left behind. 

~Jose Hernandez

War

          As I sat down in my spot, I realized a battle had just begun in front of me. The wind against the leaves. The leaves had no chance of winning; this was no war, but an attack. An attack on a helpless victim.

          The wind rolled in waves, howling past the leaves. Starting with a fierce battle cry and ending with a quiet murmur, the wind collided with the dead leaves in the canopy above. This caused them to crash into one another. rustling is the crying of  leaves being slaughtered. A strategy was being carried out. After the violent attack, a period of stillness followed. This was a rest for the wind, but a period of death for the leaves, as they fell from their branches. Each leaf sounded like a crumpling piece of paper as it hit the ground.

          In the end, the wind, with its raging howl, will devastate leaves. The  leaves will all gently crash onto the ground, however they will not completely die. They will create music on the ground, in their second life. The wind will clean up the mess it created, and blow the leaves to make music.

~ William Hunt

The Right State of Mind

          Looking at nature with an expectation to learn and enjoy may sound simple and obvious, but once I was able to do this, it made all the difference in the way I related to the natural world. For me, reaching this sense of expectation and enjoyment took a lot of time. On the first walk to my spot along the river, from inside my left jacket pocket, I played music from my phone, as  if it were a part of me without even my knowing. Then I still clung to the familiarity of technology. I wasn’t yet able to shut off all the distracting noise because I wasn’t in the right state of mind.

          On my second expedition down to the river, about a week later, I still had the misguided view of  trip as an assignment, rather than what it was: a real chance to learn and simply enjoy the panacea that nature is. I only realized this truth on the third trek down, and I’ll never forget it. Before I headed down, I grabbed the Woodberry trail map. For a while, I walked and read the map with mild interest, until I saw a quote from Henry David Thoreau: “Me thinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” This line instantly resonated with me and sent goose bumps along my arms and a shiver down my spine. Even though I hadn’t yet found the words to explain what I just felt, or why I felt it, I couldn’t help but sense that some part of me had just changed.

         As I saw it, Thoreau meant that nothing invokes as much thought and curiosity as nature, and that an active body is also an active mind. For reasons that I still don’t fully understand, in that moment I fully bought into what Thoreau was saying, and my attitude switched completely. I saw what I was doing in a new light. Now inspired with a new sense of expectation to learn and be fascinated by nature, I was seeing nature in a way I hadn’t before. Once I paid attention, sounds seemed louder and more distinct, and something as simple as a blade of grass captured more of my curiosity than I remember it ever having before in my entire life.

         From this one quote alone, which affected me as much as all the other writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and David Haskell, my outlook on nature changed from one of moderate to great curiosity and enjoyment. But maybe more even important, I came to understand that my expectations and the way I approached nature totally changed what I got out of it; once I expected to find curiosity and enjoyment in nature, I actually was curious and did enjoy being outside.

         Now when I make the journeys outside, I walk with my phone turned off and zipped inside my backpack. And instead, in my left jacket pocket, is a folded map.

        ~ Owen Jones

The Assault

          The rain gently falls through the wetland, sounding like sand slowly sprinkling onto crumpled paper.  Each droplet softly finds its way into the canopy of the forest. Each leaf rustles as the tiny drops splash onto it. Distant thunder warns. The rain grows heavier, falling like hail, ping-ping-pinging on a metal roof. Rain hits the leaves now like a barrage of bullets. 

          High in the trees raindrops beat against each leaf, which are dangling precariously on their brittle stems. When the rain becomes more severe, the drip-drip changes to drib-drup. Smack-whack, the thinner branches seem to snap in half as the robust storm passes overhead. As the sky grows even darker, heavy rain and wind drive a shower of wet withered leaves fluttering to the soaked ground. The rain has assaulted the forest, battering the trees and undergrowth with its potshots, pow-pow.

          Steadily, the sky turns lighter, drops stop falling, and the attack ceases. Slowly leaves shed the early afternoon shower. Gentle, and quiet trickles are merely echoes of the heavier rain moving off into the distance. The sound is almost as if someone shook a wet tarp. This storm moves on, threatening other vegetation in distant fields and woodlands.

 ~ Daniel Japhet III

Relating to Nature

          Nature has always been an important part of my life. Many a morning has been spent in a duck blind with my dad, and the most vivid memories I have of my grandfather are in a deer stand, but that was the extent of my perspective on what it meant to have a relationship with nature. I saw nature from one point of view, with the eye of a sportsman. I had never been exposed to the ideas of Emerson, nor had I read Thoreau’s famous entries on how to truly exist in nature. Once I opened my mind and diligently tried to wrap my head around what these men were saying, it became clear to me that all along I had been failing to grasp nature’s true essence. 

          After reading Emerson for the first time, I was skeptical. The language he used made reading each page a challenge, and the concepts he proposed were embedded in endless metaphors. It seemed so tedious, and many nights I wound up hopelessly frustrated trying to decipher each passage. Not only was it hard to read, but I also found myself questioning some of the ideas he proposed. The concept of the spiritual component of nature and the presence of an "Over-Soul" that connects all life on earth seemed too radical to be true. I soon learned that Emerson was an acquired taste. The more I read and the more we discussed as a class, the easier each night’s reading became. Emerson approached nature in a spiritual yet logical way that I couldn’t help but be fascinated by. As my views on Emerson changed, I found that visits to my mandala became much more meaningful. It becomes much easier to grasp what Emerson is saying once you spend an hour alone in nature with his ideas in mind. By no means am I in touch with the Over-Soul yet, but my view on nature has certainly been changed by Emerson’s philosophy.

           Different from Emerson, Thoreau writes in a narrative way that recreates experience that leads to the point he is trying to make. The detail and enthusiasm he portrays through his writing leaves no doubt on his passion for the subject, and that passion became contagious as I read his entries. Thoreau often spoke about putting as much distance as possible between himself and society and removing all meaningless distractions from life. That was the key to being truly in tune with nature, he believed. During my earliest trips to my mandala, I often found it hard to tune in to my surroundings. The distractions and nothingness that frequently absorb our everyday lives would not leave my thoughts easily. When I struggled to shake these thoughts, I found my visits to be boring and I came away with nothing more than a few simple observations. Later on, I learned that the best way to avoid these distractions was to genuinely be interested in what was going on around me. This came easier as the ideas of Emerson gave me a thought template, but it became effortless as I bought into Thoreau’s ideas of meaningful solitude and clear headedness. I no longer checked my watch or yearned to go back to dorm. Instead, I was perfectly content sitting alone in the woods, attentive to everything that was happening around me.

          This year has certainly been a transformation for me so far in regard to my outlook on nature. I’m not going to lie and say that the biggest attraction of nature for me isn’t hunting, but I have gained a new perspective of the smaller parts of every ecosystem. I have bought in to Emerson’s idea of the Over-Soul, and I find that his idea of the presence of God in nature isn’t hard to see no matter where you look. It’s all connected, and it becomes easier to see as you spend more time in nature. There is no better way to clear your thoughts than spending an hour alone in the woods, and I have Thoreau to thank for the ability to do that. Once you’re passionate about it, making connections and seeing meaning in all aspects of nature isn’t hard to do. I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the distractions that our generation uses as an excuse for entertainment, and I am just as guilty of it as the next, but I’ve made it a point to separate myself from those distractions at least once a day. We as a culture have lost sight of what it means to spend a day in the woods, and the ideas of Emerson and Thoreau, however timeless they are, will likely never be taken to heart by the masses. That’s a shame, because losing sight of our relationship to nature means ignoring a large part of what it means to be human.

~ Joe Luter

Lighting the Dark

         

            A dense, dreamy fog smears the boundaries between the horizon and the sky, the trees and the grass. A puffed, rolling mixture of greys and whites hangs above. Millions of these droplets slowly balloon lower and lower in the sky. But deeper in the clouds, across this shallow valley of pastureland, something catches the eye. Surrounded by an ashen ambience, a soft, yellowy-orange cloud rides the hilly horizon miles away. Its clear, warm, and rich light slowly seeps into the opaque background like ink bleeding into a piece of paper. , The florescence steadily disperses the turbulent blacks and blues.  

          
~ Justin Mitchell

What is Nature?

          Over the past few months I have seen that man and nature are connected. I have seen what I believe to be the true beauty of nature. All three writers that I’ve studied this fall (Emerson, Thoreau, and Haskell) have taught me that humans are a part of nature, but we are disconnected because of the world we live in. People don’t realize that nature is everywhere.

            Emerson speaks of man and nature being one and the same. He writes that man in his purest form is a form of nature. However, the world and society pull man away from this connection. Thoreau talks about finding solitude within ourselves because society makes everything too trivial.  I believe that men are pulled away from nature this way. As Thoreau says, even farming has become unnatural. I do believe in Emerson’s idea of the Over-Soul because I feel the connection between the world and myself. I think that the Over-Soul can explain the deep connection between people because people we are all part of nature.

          Haskell thinks that the unnatural (manmade) world is actually natural as well because something natural created it. He recognizes that golf balls in the woods belong there because animals that happen to be people put them there. I definitely agree with Haskell on this point. I don’t believe there has to be a separation between the natural and man-made world. Like Thoreau said, you don’t have to go to the corners of the Earth to find solitude. Being in nature isn’t about the place; it’s about the state of mind.

           I confirmed these thoughts in my own experience, I discovered that natural beauty can’t be located in a single element. When choosing my spot, I went to the river because I was looking for something beautiful. When I arrived, the river was the least interesting part of my experience. As I sat there, I felt the entire place:  the wind, the sounds of animals. I found beauty through my openness to experience, not through proximity to the river. Nature and beauty are often sought out on trips and vacations. However, true beauty can be found anywhere if you allow your mind to feel all of your senses.

          I now see nature as a state of being instead of a place or a concrete thing. All things are natural. Nature can be found in the woods or in the living room chair. You have to be one with yourself to find the connection to the Over-Soul.

~ Bo Pettegrew

Listening to Sounds

Crunch-unch. Crunch-unch-unch.

          Peering over my shoulder, I gaze at a shrubbery, a dense one, wondering of the noise’s origin. It seems to come from behind the bush, and it grows louder as my other senses shut off. Crunch, crack, crunch. Some creature is shifting or treading the loose leaves.  Maybe searching for something? Exploring?

          Suddenly, a brilliantly blue colored bird emerges from behind its cover, hopping about the forest floor. It does not seem to notice me as it continues poking the leaves to see what secrets lie beneath.

          This sounds like the biting of a potato chip to me. With 10,000 tiny cracks condensed into only a second, the fulfilling crunch of chip or leaf brings a feeling of completion with it. The satisfying taste of nacho cheese that follows is not with me now, but the music of the air traveler curiously exploring the forest floor brings me the same joy.

Crunch, shhhift, crunch.

          For the next few minutes I just watch the bird hop around. With every jump, I try to keep the crunching leaf sound resonating in my head as long as possible. It is not a disturbing sound, temporarily depriving the forest of harmony; rather it is a relaxing sound. The sound itself causes one to perk up and listen, while the silent after-period lets one calm down. This cycle gives the forest a melodious, swaying effect. Crunch. Silence… Crunch. Silence… The bird unknowingly captivates me with its movements. I notice nothing else as the bird hops about, breaking leaves one… by… one.

 ~ Caleb Rogers