Word - Communicating with nature

At the beginning of the semester, we talked about communicating with nature. This concept seemed familiar yet foreign to me all at the same time. I guess that's just because I never thought about nature in that way. I have always felt at home and at peace when I am in nature, more specifically in the mountains. I always enjoy being out there and just seeing all the beauty that nature has to offer. However, I never thought about how nature was actually trying to communicate with me and how I should be listening to it. It would be crazy to think that you can have verbal conversations with trees and plants. If you're talking to a flower and it starts talking back, I would suggest being a bit concerned about that. But it is interesting that nature is communicating with us by the things it does everyday. It gives us oxygen to breathe. It gives us a feeling of peace and relaxation. It gives us beauty to look at every day. It is just us who choose to ignore what nature provides for us. It is trying to speak with us and work with us. We are the ones ignoring it and mistreating it. I feel like everyone should take the time to go out into nature and just listen to what it has to say and see what it has to show us because you could fill an entire book with just one day's worth of conversations with nature. Trees and plants are living creatures too, they just communicate differently than we do. You just have to take the time to listen and understand. You may not have a conversation, but there are more ways to have a relationship with something than just speaking and writing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Campbell - Time and Primal Culture

One of the major themes that we've discussed in this class throughout the semester has been comparing and contrasting oral cultures with written cultures. There are many differences, including ritual practices, moral codes, and utilization of spaces. However, another major difference that we only briefly touched upon is the way in which primal and modern cultures differ in their dense of understanding time. In today's world, time is very linear. We consider there to be a beginning and an end, and have even become so technical as to mark the years, months, days, and even hours. We measure our lives in the passing of years and death is seen as a gateway to a new life or an eternal paradise. For primal cultures, however, life is entirely cyclical. When we die, our bodies serve as food for scavenging animals or as nutrients for the soil. Our energies are passed along to other members of the natural environment, so despite our deaths, we never stop contributing to the circle of life...
Read more

Campbell - Ossian Mythology and "Oral Texts"

Abram, David.  The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World . New York: Vintage Books, 1996. I really enjoyed Abram's historical summary of how oral language developed and transitioned into written word. He begins this account with the invention of the Hebrew alphabet, or "aleph-beth," which later served as a model for Greek linguistic advancement. However, as any geography lesson will tell you, the Greek nation was geographically broken and thus the cultural climate was highly sectarian (i.e. nation-states), so the concept of written language took awhile for people to accept. Additionally, the mystification of oral chants and stories could not be directly translated into written word, and many Greeks were rather disenchanted by this loss of oral magic. As Abram explains, "the sung stories, along with the numerous ceremonies to which they were linked, were in a sense the living encyclopedias of the culture - carrying and preserving ...
Read more

Hanscom - Lion's Gate Statue

        When we had class outside at Lion's Gate, we had a good discussion about the statue at the top of the hill. The statue commemorated a man who was responsible for making the space around it a place for the public to visit and enjoy. The statue was a very tall, geometric design of a man taming a horse with a bit in the horse's mouth on top. At the bottom of the sculpture, there are four sculptures of men holding different objects representing things we really value in American culture. One of the figures was holding a painter's palette with brushes to represent art, another figure was holding a compass with some paper to represent math/science, the third figure was holding an anvil to represent the trades that use this object for metalwork, and the fourth figure was holding a book by Homer to represent literature/storytelling. These four things represented the most important aspects of American culture at the time this sculpture was made.     ...
Read more