Blog Prompt #8: Effective Art

This course has been a journey. The literature and writing experience explored over the past four months has been both informing and enlightening. It is not a secret that I came into this class with a basket full of misconceptions and undeserved assumption toward the nature and environmental writing genre. Originally I came to the genre expecting that nature and environmental writing demanded of its authors and creative works to tackle the issues of origin, abuse, failures, and overly scientific terminology regarding our natural world. However, through the readings and the experience of nature writing I have discovered a much higher call to the nature and environmental writer. It is a call to— express the personal.

All creative writing asks the author to give the moment of experience a voice. This voice is one that is developed and individualized to the writer. Nature and environmental writing engages and evokes change most effectively when the writing serves as an individual dialogue between place and participant.

I came to the blogs having zero experience. I have never committed myself to a place (as an object of writing) in my life. I was apprehensive to the process, unsure of the products that would be created. One reason for this is because I have a fairly limited scientific background, specifically concerning ecology and biology. The first time I visited the Homestead Cemetery I set myself to observe and record. As I did I found myself saying, “Damn, I don’t know how to name or recognize any of the aspects of the landscape surrounding me.” I would look across the gentle hill to the tree line and think, gosh they are haunting, but what the heck are they? Or hear a bird that came to sing a hymn over the tombs and think, I want to write about you, but I don’t know your name. How can I write about something in a palpable way without knowing my subjects name? How can I create emotional content in my writing when I feel so ignorant?

The blogs forced me to accept my academic short comings in science and focus on the personal experience. As I began to do this, I discovered that my writing was as much about my self discovery as it was about discovering the landscape. The place and prompts given for my blog writing began to evoke emotion— from me toward the world. Whether in the present or reflecting on past I started to recognize a level of intimacy growing—a relationship forming.

Aside from my apprehension toward nature and environmental writing I did come to the course with a specific goal for the process—to develop a new connection with nature. To the casual eye the world and all of its glories can fall ineffectively like seeds to macadam. To the casual eye the beauties of what we consider mundane: our relationships (human or not), the refreshing quality of cold water, the landscapes we walk on, the deep breaths that fill our lungs after a jog, the experience of reading and writing—they all can shrink in value.

Effective art is a call to consciousness. It serves to wake us up and turn us on. Famed writer Kurt Vonnegut is quoted, “I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit.” The blog assignments and readings in this course have served to help me appreciate the natural world, the community of it, and the experience of being alive at least a little bit more.

Thanks for reading! Take care.

Place Entry #8: Picnic Party

Today will not be the last time I walk through this cemetery with my notebook and pencil. But this will be my last blog for a little while. It is finally warm. It is still gray. I think that the gray quality of Pittsburgh may be inescapable, a result from all the years that fires charged steel under these hills.

The cemetery always coaxes me into thinking about separation. Death is separation, a removal from everything established. A removal from love. There is a heaviness that comes over my chest, gray like the sky, when I see the tombstones of married couples laid in the ground next to each other. I notice the dates that they past. I think about the time in-between passings. Think about the pain that must have survived in the years following their separation.

But today, I come across two markers that do not inspire grieving over separation. About a half a mile into the cemetery lie the stones and bodies of Thomas and Maria Messler. They rest under a canopy, a tree that elbows over them. It shades them together in intimacy under the tree and away from the world.

I think about their first date. It could have been over lunch and under a tree like this. A picnic— with a country-patterned blanket— a woven basket borrowed from Thom’s mother— maybe they drank some orange juice with a splash of vodka in the afternoon.  I imagine there picnic-date. It is April; the sun is high but not aggressive. It gives way to a cool spring breeze that sifts through the tall grass in the field, and respects the privacy of the pair under the shade of the tree.

Every few minutes Maira’s hips roll over onto something hard and pointy under the checkered blanket. Her, “Ouch!” is playful and followed by a laugh. It is a good catalyst for touch, and Thom asks if she wants him to, “kiss it and make it better?” She does, and he kisses her hip covered in a sundress.

Black ants fight to get up the walls of the basket. They fling them off one at a time, and marvel at how they keep moving after they are fired from their fingers. They built a relationship through their eyes, dogging one another’s look between short kisses. They fall for each other in a dialogue of smiles, and the sharp snapping sounds from the bitten skins of apples. I imagine them kissing with their mouths full. I think people in love do that, I know I would.

Today, I smile. I slowly back away, not wanting to be a disturbance, leaving the together to their picnic and death—under the tree.

Place Entry #7: Becoming a Tree

It’s April now, but the birds are hiding. The sun slips in and out through the small tears of the clouds. It rained last night. The cemetery is wet, it has been for months.  I usually stay on the paved “roads” of the cemetery, especially on the wet days (I wear canvas shoes), but I decide to pave my own way today— not the best decision I have ever made.

The landscape of the cemetery is a swamp today. Taking less than 10 steps down the east slope from the center of the cemetery (I know that it is east because I have a compass app on my iphone) I am frozen in mud—stuck. By frozen I mean, I noticed the fun wet feeling you get when your feet sink more than an inch (past the white rubber of my Converse) into the soaked earth. There is no feeling more easily explained and universal understood than—wet.

Looking down I see the mud rising, climbing up the rubber and staining the fabric of my shoes. I have become an anchor—a root, planted in this moment. I don’t take another step forward.

 I think about staying here, becoming a tree. I lift my elbows. I look like a scarecrow. I let everything:  my forearm’s, the bones in my wrists and my fingers become branches, knots, and twigs. I am one of them now. The thought makes me smile. I look around and a laugh from my belly. I think, if my parents could see me right now, they would know the value of my education.  

Blog Prompt #7: The Lilac

In the Avett Brothers’ song “St. Josephine" they sing, “If it’s this place or any other/ it’s not where I am/ it’s who I am with.” Company informs our experiences, it charges them with: value, weight, meaning, and transformative powers.

In my experience with nature the most recognizable/prominent company that I have had is my family. Growing up on the farm we were, in some ways, cut-off from the secular world. We (my family) had the house, the land, and each other to fill our days. My brother and I ran in the fields, plotted to sneak up on the cows (but never had the courage to get too close, fearing the immanent and killing stampede that would surely follow our spooking), shot our bows and arrows screaming through the trees at our imaginations, and then hid from it all in the lilac bushes.

The bushes and the petals of the lilac still evoke a personal response from me unlike any other feature the landscape has to offer. The bodies of those bushes 20 years ago were the walls of a castle. The brown bars of twig and vine were hallways, ballrooms, watchtowers, and hidden doorways to our secret “escape passages”.

The baby-purple majesty of the lilac only lasts a couple weeks out of the year. My father used to sneak Cody and I the kitchen shears, and tell us to go cut a few bunches off for our mother, “Hurry, I’ll put some water in the vase boys. It will be a surprise.” He would smile; we would run to the bushes, collect the pretty, and scribble a love note in purple crayon.

We had to be fast—the colors of the lilac live quick lives, they are a moment in the year all too short. This is why they treasured. As soon as you notice the lilac bloom you have to begin to appreciate it or your miss the whole thing. You cannot waste a second marvel.

 Every year, in May, whether I see a lilac bush or not I think about the brevity of the glorious moments in our lives. The moments we want to hold on to like hot water in the shower. I will never get to go back to the lilac bush playhouse my brother and I loved so much—never get to crawl under the electric fence to where the cows lived— never work with my father to give my mother flowers, but the lilac’s understated petals are still a treasure. I don’t believe that there is much truth in memories, but the lilac brings me to a fond reflection. I remember how simple life was together (at least in my eyes). Isn’t this the way we are supposed to live? Is it ever possible to maintain anything so simple?