I
reflect now on the owl-necking, teetering inability to take it all in; all the
trees, their twigs, branches, vines, berries, flowers, blades of grass, sounds
of buzzing, chirping of birds and crickets, the crunch of leaves under foot
step and the gentle crash of the newly fallen, the paddle of the water flowing
into itself, the warm, sticky air, smooth scents and the biting ones too.
Did
the trail and all its components laugh at my bewilderment and ignorance or was
it looking at me the same way, like a virginal experience each time we entered
one another? Did we know each other so well that the comfort became
uncomfortable and we needed to open our awareness to one another again?
Lane
writes, “places themselves participate in the perception that is made of them”(44), which leads me to understand my own experience with the natural world as one
purely conceptualized by my awareness of such experience. As I listen, observe,
and allow myself to marvel at the wonderful brutality of nature, I reflect on
the relentless desire for equilibrium in my own life. I begin to understand the
balance nature plays within its own existence through survival of the fittest,
forest fires, floods, and other “natural” disasters, which claim “disaster” only by
human’s perception.
Because place participates in perception, I
provide a vehicle through which a place may have a voice. One may never
know what place sounds like or looks like or feels like without my accounts or their own experience with place.
As our brains attempt to comprehend and categorize the world around us, we can observe how even this observation is an illusion of how we want to believe something to be.
Sutherlan Spruck
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