Response 12: Reflections on the Semester

At the beginning of the semester, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this course. I had never tried to do any nature writing before, and I didn't know much about it. I was worried that I would have a hard time writing about nature, and that nature writing would be dull or overly idealized. As it turns out, I have been pleasantly surprised by the variety of writing that is termed "nature writing," and I'm glad that this class exposed me to so many different approaches and voices and styles. I found plenty of darkness and complexity in the works we read, and I definitely plan to continue to read nature writing in the future.

Before this class, I didn't see myself as a nature writer, but now I think I will incorporate descriptions of the natural world into my writing whenever possible. I've already noticed myself doing this in my writing for my nonfiction workshop. This class has shown me that descriptions of nature can be essential in placing a reader in the world of the narrative, and I've noticed myself thinking more about people (including myself) as outgrowths of their environments. As I think about some of the writing I'd like to do in the future, particularly about my travels in India and Korea, I feel like a whole new world has opened up to me in terms of what I can write about. For instance, when I lived in Korea, I first really understood how far from home I was when I noticed a black-and-white bird everywhere that I had never seen before. This bird was as common in Korea as a pigeon or a crow is here. At the time, I never thought of that bird as something I could write about, but now I can see developing it into a metaphor for my experience of the culture.

Surprisingly, I had never realized before that nature writing provides a logical way to connect my writing with my background in biology. I have wanted to find a way to write about the sciences for a long time, but I envisioned library-based research rather than observation of the natural world. Now I can see there is room for both of these possibilities.

I’ve also discovered that nature provides valuable material for meditative writing. Before this class, I would often take my journal outside and write as I sat somewhere in the natural world, but I would never write about the natural world; I would only write about my internal feelings or what was going on in my life. Through keeping my nature blog every week, I've learned that I can write about my internal world through writing about the natural world, and that this often happens unconsciously and unintentionally. As long as I observe what I see closely and stay with it and give it time, something emerges in my writing that is more than just superficial description. This has been a wonderful discovery for me; one of my issues with writing is trying to step outside of myself and engage my surroundings.

If I could take this class over again, I would want to spend more of the semester working on my final essay. That is what I initially aimed to do – I wanted to turn my blog about the cemetery into a longer piece. But when it came time to do that, I couldn’t figure out how to make it come together, I’m not quite sure why. I think I put a lot of time and energy into the blog week by week, but not enough time into thinking about how it could become an essay. I was disappointed not to be able to use my blog for my final project because I enjoyed it so much and felt very connected to it. I hope to do some type of project about the cemetery in the future, and I plan to continue my blog. I feel like I've only begun to explore the small clearing I chose as my site. I still haven't identified most of the species that live there, and I haven't seen winter or spring or summer there yet. Also, I've gathered some historical information about the cemetery and I've established some connections for conducting interviews.

I'm so glad I took this class and I've especially enjoyed keeping the blog. I hope to continue to write about the natural world as I move forward with my writing. Check back periodically for more cemetery posts!

Place 12: Dusk

Saturday November 28, 2009 4:43 pm

The first two things I notice when I come into the cemetery: the color of the light reflecting off bare tree branches, a glassy amber; and crows, there must be hundreds of them. As I start out on the road to the clearing, I see crows everywhere I look. Some perch atop tree limbs at the crowns of bare trees; silhouetted in the falling light they looked like large, fickle leaves. Others pose in the grass and among the tombstones and a few brazen souls sit right in the middle of the road. My eyes follow their black bodies from one to the next, as if trying to connect the dots or resolve their scattered forms into some larger, coherent shape: through the grass, across the road, up the hillside, into the trees, and as I approach they break ranks and rise into the sky. The air fills with caws and the beating of their black wings.

As I continue down the road, I pass two turkeys and numerous deer. The colors are so delicate at this time of day, right before dusk. Everything is cast in shades of rose and pale blue and gray. The sunlight catches the trees and illuminates them in its pink-orange glow.

The clearing looks so soft and gentle in this light. Crows are perched in the tops of all the trees, even the dead tree I've come to love so much. I notice that my dead tree is starting to look almost like the other trees, now that they've all lost their leaves. One difference is that the dead tree has only its thick, main limbs; it lacks the smaller capillary branches that the other trees have. And it’s a slightly different color, whitish-gray, while the other trees tend more towards brown. Despite these differences, it’s starting to blend in with the trees around it. Many more leaves have fallen since the last time I was here; almost every leaf is gone from the trees now. I was starting to doubt my memories of winter landscapes filled with nothing but barren gray branches. I try to enter the clearing slowly and quietly so the crows won't fly away, but I fail.

The floor of the clearing appears to have been torn up again. Maybe construction equipment has pushed the mounds of dirt back towards the side of the ravine. I'm not sure how it happened or why, but the puddles in front of the dirt piles are wider and deeper than I've ever seen them before. From a certain perspective, the sense of scale is lost and the mound of dirt in back of the puddle rises like a mountain beside a lake.

The muddy ground keeps a record of other creatures that have visited the clearing recently. I think these are deer tracks - this is something I hope to investigate more in the future.

I turn to face the other side of the clearing, to the elm tree and the piles of marble slabs, and to my surprise I see the moon glowing clear and soft in the blue sky behind a thicket of bare branches.

In each direction I look, the light and sky are so different. At the back of the clearing the moon shines in light blue twilight; out past the ravine, the pink dusk settles over hills and houses; and when I turn towards the gate to the clearing, I see that the sky is a gradient of blue to white to yellow to orange, like the reverse of a flame.

It's cold today. I'm bundled in coat and scarf and hat and gloves. It's muddy too, and my feet slip and sink into ground as I walk. But I have a hard time leaving. This is such a special moment, caught between night and day. As I walk outside of the clearing, I turn and look back. I will continue to come here and keep this blog after the class ends. I feel like I have only begun to know this place.

Place 11: Opening

Tuesday November 17, 2009 1:32pm

On the way to the clearing today I noticed the evergreens in the cemetery more than ever before. When the deciduous trees still had their leaves the evergreens faded into the background. For the first time today I started to notice the different shapes and colors of the evergreens – full and pyramidal or spindly and asymmetrical, with undertones of blue or violet or rust. The shapes and attitudes of the bare trees are becoming more familiar too. I notice that some have straight, smooth branches splayed heavenward like gigantic brooms and others are twisted, knobbly and curving. With some practice I think I might be able to identify them even in winter.

Today is windy and colder than it looked from inside my car, despite the blue skies and warm sunshine. As I enter the clearing the wind gusts strong and rattling, blowing away the sun that is trying to warm me. The clearing feels so much more open this week, like the walls have all come down. Now on every side I can see clearly the landscape beyond the trees. The boundaries of this place have all but disappeared. When I look towards the gate, this is what I see:

Looking into the ravine this week, the way down is perfectly clear. All obstructions have vanished. I see another part of the cemetery stretching out below and I see streets and houses beyond that. Next week I want to finally go down the ravine to explore.

Although most of the branches in the clearing are bare, some leaves still hang on. When the sun hits these leaves they shine out golden against the backdrop of gray branches crisscrossing sky.

There aren’t nearly as many fallen leaves on the ground this week. They must have been raked up or blown away with leaf blowers. I saw several groundskeepers blowing leaves when I came into the cemetery. The clearing floor looks better than it has in a long time – it has reverted to the dry, cracked light-brown soil that it had when I first came here. The tire tracks and the puddles that had collected in them are hardly visible. The expanse of dry soil soothes me.

I wonder how I would have conceived of this place if I had come to it first in winter; maybe I wouldn’t have called it a clearing at all. The way we first see something has such an effect on how we view it after that. I think this is true with people as well as places. When I’ve known someone for a long time, I see them as a kind of composite of their past and present selves. I lose the ability to see them with new eyes. When I look at my clearing now it is with an awareness of its other seasonal identities. I see it lush with green leaves; brilliant with yellow, orange and red; bare and open – all at the same time. Time and repetition create this layering. Having spent almost my whole life in Pittsburgh, I walk through these layers everywhere. But the layers are internal too – I’ve walked into them in first-time places, and on the other side of the world.

Response 11: Jimmy Santiago Baca

I thoroughly enjoyed Jimmy Santiago Baca's poetry, especially the selections from Martín and Meditations on the South Valley. I was surprised that this poem had such a strong narrative flow; it was like nonfiction and poetry at the same time, and not just because it was autobiographical. This poem placed me in specific scenes and places and moments and told a cohesive story – in this sense it reminded me of prose. But Baca’s language and image and metaphor certainly belong to poetry. (I’m not saying this because I feel like it’s necessary to debate whether this piece is poetry or prose; I’m just trying to get at qualities that make it unique.)

One of the first things I noticed as I read Martín and Meditations was Baca’s sparing use of articles: “Grandma Lucero at the table / smokes Prince Albert cigarette / rolled from a can, / sips black coffee from metal cup” (15). The lack of articles creates a pared-down language and evokes a more essential or elemental (as Sheryl calls it) type of language, or perhaps a language that has been translated into English. When language is translated, articles are often omitted. Leaving out articles also seems to intensify the meaning and purpose of each word, and when Baca does use an article it seems more necessary and meaningful. I think I tend to ignore articles a bit when I read, but I found myself paying attention to each of Baca’s words.

I also noticed that I read Baca’s poems very slowly. His images and ideas are so rich and emotional that I had to pause and reread to try to absorb them. He uses many words that I hadn’t heard before, Spanish words or words particular to features of the southwestern landscape. These words transmit a culture and a specific setting in ways that translations never could. As I encountered and investigated unfamiliar words, phrases and allusions, I gained a glimpse into a cultural surround that had previously been unknown to me.

Another interesting aspect of Baca’s language is his use of words that are usually nouns as verbs. For instance: “and pail windmill water to calves and pigs” (22) and “where sun hacksaws tin sheets of glistening air” (113). I found some of Baca’s constructions challenging because I first had to figure out what part of speech different words were supposed to be, and then how to understand the syntax and interpret the meaning: “whose yellow teeth tore the alfalfa out of their hearts, / and left them stubbled, / parched grounds old goats of tecatos and winos / nibbled” (21). Phrases like the ones above disoriented me and slowed me down, but in a good way. The result was that my attention became fixed on Baca’s language, and on language in general. I stopped and chewed his words.

Baca’s use of metaphor is magical. Here’s one of my favorite: “The lonely afternoon in the vast expanse of llano, / was a blue knife / sharpening its hot, silver edge on the distant / horizon of mountains, … /” (22). I read those lines again and again, trying to let the image and the feeling sink in.

I really loved reading these poems and I plan to read more of his poems in the near future. His writing is arrestingly, hauntingly beautiful. I admire the way that he weaves together personal history with dream and mythology and landscape and culture. The story of his life is incredible in and of itself, but his way of capturing and sharing his experience is even more incredible. I am so excited that he is coming to Chatham and that we will have a chance to meet with him and ask him questions.

Place 10: Night

Tuesday November 10, 2009 5:56 pm

I waited until evening to come to the cemetery today because I wanted to see it at night. I brought Stephen with me because I thought I'd be too afraid walking around by myself. The path to the clearing was dark, darker than I anticipated. There are no streetlamps or other lights in the cemetery.

In the darkness the landscape is pared down to shapes and silhouettes - white tombstones and black trees. The trees seem quiet and still as we pass, like they're holding their breath, but not in a menacing way. In contrast to my experience here at dusk a few weeks ago, the cemetery grounds feel completely safe. They also feel completely empty, at least of people. We don't see one single human. We do see several deer. The first one bounds up a hillside amongst graves and the second, with two slender single-pointed horns, stands stock still a few feet from the road. He seems to believe his motionlessness confers invisibility and maintains it perfectly even when we approach. I'm surprised at how calm and benign the cemetery feels tonight. Perhaps it's because of the unseasonably warm weather - in the sixties on a November evening.

The clearing is even darker than the road. I think I know this place so well now that I'm more aware of what I can't see. The sky is an expanse of uninterrupted cloud cover that seems to hold the light of the city and reflect it back amplified. In the day this sky would probably be flat Pittsburgh white, but by night it glows soft lilac, brighter near the horizon. From inside the clearing I feel encircled by bare trees, their delicate black script written from the ground into the dome of the sky, thinning as it ascends.

The sound of the wind through the trees is different now than it was before the leaves fell. Now it is crisper, smoother, more direct. It catches branches in its grip but doesn't hold on for long. Over the summer the wind roared through the trees, catching each individual leaf and shaking the heavy green limbs. I know that it will change again as winter deepens, growing harsher and raspier and more rattling, but tonight it feels warm and gentle.

The darkness makes the clearing monochromatic and until I take a flash picture I forget all about the colors. Looking at the picture is strange and disorienting and the colors don't seem real. It reminds me of watching an old movie that's been colorized: everything in the foreground is too saturated and the background is still in black-and-white. The color pictures don't represent what the landscape looks like so I will use black-and-white photos to approximate it. When I try to take close-ups, the flash hits the objects and makes them stand out white against a black background, resulting in an image that is the reverse of what it actually looks like.



The piles of dirt lose their sense of scale as I look at them in the dim light. They start to look like mountain ranges and gigantic hills. Seeing them this way makes me wish I had a flashlight so that I could examine them more closely, and makes me wonder why I've never looked closely at them before. I haven't gotten close enough to see what kinds of insects live in them or what kind of plants grow on top of them. One dirt pile near the marble slab collection hasn't changed at all since I've been coming here. The grasses growing out of it suggest that it hasn't been disturbed in a while. A few weeks ago I talked to some people that work in the cemetery's administrative office and they said that some of the old gravestones piled in this clearing have been here for decades. They don't know if they'll ever use them for anything but they keep them here just in case.

Response 10: Sewage and Sandblasting

When I bought my first house in 2006, one of the points of contention in our contract with the seller was who would pay for the cost of repairing the home’s water drainage system in accordance with new city of Pittsburgh regulations. Our real estate agent told me that the EPA had ordered Pittsburgh and all of Allegheny County to revamp their outdated sewer systems because storm runoff was flowing into the same sewer lines that carry waste and causing raw sewage to overflow into the rivers. This was the first I had heard of this problem, and I don’t know if I fully believed it. But I looked into it and found out she was right. Pittsburgh residents would soon be forced to reorient their gutter downspouts so that they didn’t flow into sanitary sewer lines and then there was a dye test to make sure that homeowners were abiding by the regulations. Our agent said these regulations had been a long time coming and all the other municipalities in Allegheny County had already fixed the problem. Pittsburgh would be the last. We asked the seller for a credit of close to $2000 to make the necessary repairs and they gave it to us. When I thought about all of the homeowners who would have to pay a similar sum of money, I started to realize the magnitude of the problem. Not to mention the environmental damage the raw sewage had already caused.

This project will end up costing the city and county billions of dollars and residents will have to pay too in terms of alterations to their homes and higher bills. I think it is well worth paying more to fix Pittsburgh's sewage problem, but I worry about the sewage that has already found its way into the rivers. I read that the deadline to eliminate sewage overflow into the area's rivers is 2026. And what about cleaning up the sewage that's already there?

If I wanted to write lyrically about the sewage problem in Pittsburgh, maybe I could connect it to a narrative about the relationship I was in at the time I bought my first house. There are some parallels, like the idea of problems lurking below the surface and the fact that the solution (whether repairing the sewer system or breaking up the relationship) didn’t really fix things.

Another topic I might like to write lyrically about is growing up in Pittsburgh as it worked to change its reputation from a smoggy steel town to a clean, thriving place to live. When I was a child, many Pittsburgh landmarks were still covered in soot. I remember walking around in Oakland and seeing the Carnegie Library and the Cathedral of Learning and thinking they were made of black stones. Then little by little crews of sandblasters came in and cleaned the stones. Sandblasting was a part of my childhood vocabulary and the process was mysterious and intriguing. I didn’t understand that the stones were not naturally black and it was hard to grasp the idea that they had been turned black by air pollution. I think it would be interesting to explore some of these ideas from a child’s point of view and to integrate current reflections and research.

Writing an environmental argument would be a challenge for me because it’s not the mode I’m used to writing in. I like the idea of including resources at the end of an essay or a book related to environmental issues, like Janisse Ray did at the end of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. I also like the idea of writing a small section at the end of a piece with a discussion of steps that people can take to address environmental issues discussed. For instance, if I were writing a lyric essay about sandblasting and my memories of Pittsburgh, I could include an afterword about current air quality in the city and steps for improving it.

Place 9: Bones

Tuesday November 3, 2009 9:34 am

Many trees are bare-branched today and crispy brown leaves coat the ground. Intricate patterns of trunks and branches appear black against the bright late-morning sky, strewn with motionless clouds. The slant and intensity of the sunlight are undeniably wintery. Against the vibrant blue background of sky, I follow the curves of trunks and branches, imagining in time-lapse progression how they might have grown up from saplings. Now that most of the leaves are gone, my eyes are drawn to the color and texture of the different kinds of bark, some marbled green with lichens. The bare trees remind me of blood vessels, the vena cava of the trunk branching into venule-like limbs and ending in tiny capillaries.

The cemetery is beautiful today, a different type of beauty. Since many of the leaves are fallen, my eye has time to rest between flashes of color. Somehow I appreciate it more when my gaze lands on a yellow and red star maple still in leaf, or notices delicate gray seed pods or bright red berries at the ends of bare limbs. Some trees have just a few leaves left at the ends of their branches and they look to me like lights at the end of a string.

Crows caw loudly from time to time and smaller chirps fill in the quiet intermittently. I learned recently that many local bird species, including some crows and blue jays, don't fly south for the winter. I'm glad they'll be around to punctuate the cold with their songs. I feel the cold in my nose and throat and especially my ears – I can sense the contours of my ear canals from the shape of the cold air inside.

On the way to the clearing I see three Japanese maples planted together. Last week they were deep crimson purple and breathtaking but this week they are totally bare. All at once they lost their leaves and now they cover ground underneath like a pool. The leaves on the ground look like blood running out of the trees, beautiful blood. I wish humans left something beautiful behind like that. The human corpse doesn’t seem very beautiful; maybe that’s why we bury it. But then again who knows how the trees view our corpses. Maybe our corpses seem beautiful to them.

Now that many of the leaves have fallen, I can see the clearing through the thicket as I approach. In the summer this view was totally hidden. The change reminds me of the way curtains in back of a play’s set turn translucent at the end of a scene, just before they lift away. As I enter the clearing I see that its floor is covered in leaves and I feel relieved that the tire-torn landscape is hidden.

Around the perimeter of the clearing, the Japanese knotweed has lost its leaves and turned reddish-brown. It looks like a fence made of long rusty nails welded together. Although the leaves behind the knotweed have thinned, the clearing doesn’t feel as open or exposed as I thought it would.

I can’t believe that the trees near the gate are the same ones that seemed so fully dominated by vines several weeks ago. The canopy of one of the trees - I thought it was an oak but now I'm not sure - is in full leaf, green like the first green of spring. It is as if the tree has begun a second life since the vines relaxed their hold. The only sign of the vines, for now, are clutches of naked woody stems. They don't even show up in the pictures.

I’m becoming more interested in what’s down the hillside at the bottom of the ravine – I can see so much more of it now than before. It's dizzying to stand here, looking down. Without the leaves, I see birds alighting in the trees. When I first started coming here I rarely saw a bird, only heard them. Next week I will bring binoculars to try to identify some of them. I don’t know anything about bird watching but it seems like this would be a good season for it. So far this season I’ve seen wild turkeys, crows, geese, blue jays, sparrows and others I can’t identify. I’ve noticed that once I learn to identify a plant or animal I suddenly see it everywhere. Blue jays are easy to spot and they are active today in the clearing. I’ve seen five or six fly overhead since I arrived, moving from one tree to another. Now two jays come to rest in the upper branches of the smooth, white tree that rises from the center of the ravine, long dead.

Through all of the changes from week to week, this one dead tree has remained constant. I’ve wanted to identify it but I don’t know how; it lacks the conventional markers like leaves, twigs and fruit. Even the bark is all but stripped away. The task of identifying this tree might be something like skeletal analysis – deducing gender from the angle of a femur, strength from the size of muscle attachment points, intelligence from cranial capacity. How elegant the death of this tree: to leave behind its graceful body, still standing upright; its beautiful bones swept clean by the wind.

Response 9: The Solace of Open Spaces

In her essay “The Solace of Open Spaces” Ehrlich connects Wyoming's vast spaces and severe, sudden weather to the way social relations are constructed. Ehrlich asserts that the solitude people live in makes them quiet, that their language is pared-down and communication takes place through silent understanding and interpretation of subtle gestures (6-7). She writes that “people are blunt with one another, sometimes even cruel, believing honesty is a stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals” (11). This description of the way people interact with one another is reminiscent of Ehrlich’s rendering of the unforgiving landscape and weather. Both the bluntness and the severe climate serve to toughen people up. People who live in such isolation must learn to be self-reliant. Ehrlich dramatizes this through anecdotes like the one about her friend who cut off half his foot but stopped to open and close the ranch gate on the way to the hospital. In “The Smooth Skull of Winter” Ehrlich expands upon the idea that “good-naturedness is concomitant with severity” (5) when she discusses the ways in which people help each other during harsh winter months. To illustrate the sense of “camaraderie” (73) that such extreme conditions bring, Ehrlich writes much of this essay using first-person plural, “we” and “our.”

Even though Ehrlich’s connections between Wyoming’s nature and culture do make sense to me, sometimes I find myself doubting her generalizations and questioning her ability to speak for the residents of the state when she has only been living there for eight years. For instance, in “About Men” Ehrlich writes, “In our hellbent earnestness to romanticize the cowboy we’ve ironically disesteemed his true nature” (49). I find it ironic that she replaces “our” mistaken romanticization with her own. Ehrlich still asserts that there is a true cowboy nature (“his true nature”) and spends the rest of the essay articulating it. At least Ehrlich's characterization has more depth and dimension than a superficial depiction like the Marlboro man, and it adds valuable complexity to the idea of a cowboy, but I still feel like something is missing. Perhaps what's lacking is the perspective of someone who has lived in Wyoming their whole life, and of course Ehrlich can never have this. I can still appreciate and enjoy her work despite this, but her outsider-ness is often in the back of my mind.

I think the landscape of Pittsburgh has influenced the city by making individual neighborhoods more insular and self-contained. Hills and valleys and rivers and mountains create natural boundaries between neighborhoods, and people often seem content to stay in their own areas. Pittsburgh neighborhoods are organized largely according to race and ethnicity, and each has its own business district that reflects the needs and identities of its inhabitants. Much of the city’s commerce and recreation takes place within these neighborhoods, rather than downtown. I haven’t spent much time in other cities so I can’t be sure how different the situation is in Pittsburgh, but I have noticed that downtown is usually an area where people from different neighborhoods come together. Downtown Pittsburgh is certainly not such a place, although it seems to be getting closer.

Pittsburgh grew up around the steel industry and the culture of working in steel mills, and still identifies itself as a scrappy, hard-working, blue-collar town. Workers in steel mills worked long shifts doing punishing, physical work and came to pride themselves on toughness and resiliency. Although the steel industry no longer plays the role it once did, Pittsburghers still define themselves based on the perceived characteristics of steel workers. I think this is especially clear in the way Pittsburghers relate to the Steelers, who are often referred to as a “blue-collar” team. Pride in the steel industry and its workers seems to persist in the city’s football obsession.

These days, many Pittsburghers are originally from other cities, or have parents from other cities. Both of my parents are originally from New York and only moved to Pittsburgh in 1981, although they lived sixty miles away for nine years before that. Many of the friends that I grew up with are also first-generation Pittsburghers. I think this fact dilutes the relationship between nature and culture. In Ehrlich’s essays, I got the sense that most of the people she wrote about came from families who had lived in Wyoming (or at least in the West) for generations. People didn’t seem to move in and out of Wyoming too frequently and so a certain purity of culture was maintained, unpolluted by transplants from other areas. Also, people in Ehrlich’s Wyoming live much closer to the natural landscape than a city girl like me. So while there are connections between the nature and culture of Pittsburgh, I think they might be a little harder to see and difficult to generalize about.

Place 8: Something Else

Tuesday October 26, 2009 11:00 am

The first thing I notice coming into the cemetery today is that the bright orange maples near the entrance have lost all their leaves. The changes this week are more dramatic than in prior weeks. This week the majority of the leaves have changed and I wonder if the trees are already slightly past their prime. Still, the colors are incredibly beautiful. It takes a long time to reach the clearing because I stop to take so many pictures. Taking pictures is a clumsier process than usual because I'm wearing gloves. The air is noticeably colder this week but calm, no wind. This is a different kind of cold than the cold snap a few weeks ago. That one felt hasty, rash, bitter. Everyone knew it wouldn't last. This cold feels more measured and thoughtful; it's settling in to stay.

I reach my clearing and it glows orange and yellow, seeming to radiate warmth as well as light. Around the perimeter of the clearing the ground is covered with leaves and the foxtail grasses are dry and yellow like hay. The tree in the ravine with the purple seed pods has lost its lime-green leaves and stands out even more against the orange background.

Almost all of the trees have turned now, only a few still in green. The vine-smothered trees near the gate don't look so forbidding anymore; leaf-fall has exposed the dark caverns of understory like the insides of a half-built house. Now only bare vine skeletons engird the tree limbs and the trees' crowns are visible above them, finally set free.

The vines themselves have changed color too: the one encircling the oak is yellowy-orange and the one creeping up the maple is flaming orange-red. Who would’ve thought winter would make things seem gentler and less threatening? Winter has less hiding places, I suppose, less spots for fear and danger to lurk. I never thought of it that way before.

When I first got here today I saw my three turkeys again, in a different part of the clearing than before. This time they were near the viney trees, and they left unhurried but deliberately, the same as always. This is the third time I've seen them here, always three together. I don’t remember seeing turkeys around Pittsburgh growing up, but I've seen a lot of them over the past ten years or so. I was curious about the turkeys in Pittsburgh so I read into it. I found out that in 1900 only several thousand turkeys remained in Pennsylvania due to hunting and loss of forest habitat, but populations rebounded as forests regrew and limits were placed on hunting. Today hundreds of thousands live throughout Pennsylvania, in almost every county. (If you look closely in the center of the next picture you can see one from today.)

The colors in the ravine are spectacular. The hills behind are twilight purple, the sky is streaked with blue, the clouds lie in horizontal layers. Birds chirp in the background, calm little chirps, not frantic, and I hear crows, as always. Last week on my way out I saw a whole flock of crows, at least thirty. They stood in our path but flew away as we neared. I saw a blue jay again this week too. I don't remember seeing jays at first and I wonder if I see them now because of how they stand out against the leaves.

Looking down the side of the ravine, I find myself wishing I could capture it more somehow. I've taken pictures, written descriptions, recorded sounds, but it doesn't seem sufficient. Why this desire to have to have a record of everything? This is such a big part of why I write. My trips here have taught me so much about what I cannot keep or grasp. I can't even identify a fraction of the species here, in this one tiny spot inside of one tiny cemetery inside of one of millions of cities. I can't track changes in sky or leaves or birdcalls from minute to minute let alone week to week. But none of that is the goal anyway I suppose. The goal is something else.

Response 8: Nature Poetry

One poem that spoke to me loudly on a visceral and emotional level was Lucille Clifton's "defending my tongue." The language in this poem is not standard English and punctuation and capitalization are absent. The voice itself - the way it speaks, the words it chooses - says so much about landscape and place, and says it in a way that description and metaphor can't. I appreciate that this poem was included with the other examples of nature poetry because it is not a traditional nature poem. The words are harsh and bitter and angry, sometimes almost violent. The posture in the poem is defensive, as evidenced by the title and the first stanza in which the narrative voice justifies why it must be as it is. The tone is often accusatory, perhaps directed at writers or nature poets or members of the dominant culture in general who talk about the beauty of the landscape and leave out the pain of its people. Clifton doesn't use specific or complex language to describe the landscape, she mentions only "the dirt" and "the tree." These are recorded as sites of suffering: "...the trees / my grandfolk swung from the dirt / they planted in and ate". There's nothing about conservation of the natural world in this poem. The landscape is destroyed, but not in an ecological sense. To me, this is a poem that shows how intimately human experience and the landscape are connected, and that these connections aren't always a choice. Sometimes the connection is forced and ugly and so traumatic that it breaks the landscape forever.

Another poem I appreciated for its use of language was W.S. Merwin's "The Last One." I thought the rhythm, repetition of words and phrases, unadorned language and seemingly matter-of-fact tone amplified the themes of this poem, like the apathy and hubris of the cutters (not sure what else to call them), and the distance between them and the natural world. There was no punctuation in this poem except for a period at the end of every line. This seemed to underline the finality and starkness of everything that occured. It also had the effect of strangely disconnecting the lines from each other, as if an observer watching the events in the poem unfold might not see a connection between cause and effect. The structure of the poem also made it a feel bleak, detached, and numb, giving it a mock-objective quality. Another aspect of this poem I enjoyed is that after the line "They took it away its shadow stayed on the water" the poem becomes like magical realism, like mythology, (perhaps almost like a B-horror movie). I didn't expect that. Mythologies hold a certain kind of authority, an archetypal or emotional truth, and co-opting that form gave that to this poem as well.

"Walk in Tick Season" made me think differently about depicting human relationships with the natural world because it shows the human as passive in the interaction with the tick. Much of the nature poetry I've read, if it includes a human character, shows the human as the active party, for better or for worse. I like the idea of thinking about ways in which the natural world acts on us as humans, rather than vice versa. I hope to explore this in future writing. In "Tick Season," the human is aware and narrating the tick's journey, but it is from the tick's point of view. The tick is the heroine of the poem, even though she is doing something pretty unpleasant to the narrator. I like the fact that Laurie Kutchins chose a tick for her subject in the first place - very different than writing about a flower or a tree or a landscape. I think Kutchins is able to pull this poem off because she doesn't weigh in on what she (the human) thinks about the tick being there. She just imagines the tick's point of view and narrates it. This poem got me thinking about nature writing topics I hadn't thought about before. Maybe I'll try to write a lyrical piece about an insect, or an earthworm, at some point. I've always loved earthworms and owe them a great debt from a long-ago Biology class.

Place 7: Impermanence

Tuesday October 20, 2009 12:00 pm

As I enter the cemetery the clock strikes noon. My boyfriend, Stephen, is with me. He just came back from eight months in India and he says the chiming reminds him of the Muslim call to prayer. It will be interesting to have his perspective today. There is a burning smell in the air, like burning leaves. I love this smell. It reminds me of early childhood, when I lived in the country. But few people burn leaves in the city. I wonder what that smell is. I wonder if it's coming from the crematorium. A morbid thought that the smell of burning bodies would comfort me, call up childhood memories of the Pennsylvania countryside. I spent some times in Varanasi, in India, and the smell of burning bodies filled the streets. One of our favorite restaurants sat several stories directly about one of the burning ghats. I remember some days we had to close the restaurant's windows because ashes floated up, threatening to get in our eyes and mouth and food. But we stayed there at our table by the window, eating our cheese-spread and tomato sanwiches, and we returned almost every day. It seems terrible thinking back on it, but it would have been impossible to survive there if I tried to avoid seeing and breathing in death.

When we get to the clearing, Stephen wants to see the marble slab logs so we walk to where they lie in long stacked rows in the thinning shade of the large elm tree. As we approach, a fit of motion and two young deer trot away from us into the thicket, white tails bobbing. Their movement stikes me as calm and efficient, rather than rushed or afraid. The fallen elm leaves coating the ground are light green like the first green of spring and light yellow, not the deep yellow-gold that I'd been expecting based on the first fallen elm leaves I saw weeks ago. I wonder why this is. Something to look into later.

The first thing Stephen says is, "It doesn't feel like we're in the cemetery." He's right, I've thought about that before too. If you look back towards the car-gate that closes off the clearing you can see a few headstones on a hill beyond it, but other than that no gravesites are visible in any direction. The clearing is long and tapering, shaped like an eye elongated on one side. Thicket encloses it on one border and the ravine and trees on the other. This must be one of the few places in the cemetery where you can forget where you are. I chose it for that reason: so I could focus on the trees and grasses and pebbles and soil and not on the graves themselves. But the cemetery is very much present in this place: in the marble slabs and dirt piles and maybe even in the sense of quiet.

Stephen sits down on the marble slab logs with his book so that I can walk around the clearing and observe on my own. I never would have thought to sit on those marble slabs, it seemed unseemly to me somehow, like sitting on a gravestone. When I came here at first I felt like there was no place to sit down, except on the dusty brown ground littered with pebbles. Then I found my meditation rock but that was plowed over with mud within a week or two. Looking around now, I can't find my rock anywhere. It was such a big, strong rock and seemed so firmly planted in the dirt - I didn't expect it to go anywhere. I expected the impermanence of the tree leaves and grasses, but not the ground and the big rocks. Now the soil is all mud, completely scraped over. Tire tracks are visible and it seems like some kind of heavy machinery must have leveled out the soil. The dry, pebbly surface is gone except in small patches near the perimeter.

Another big change that I hadn't anticipated: the piles of dirt are all but gone too, the multicolored ones that used to sit in front of the ravine. Maybe the dirt's been used to fill in graves, or for fall plantings like the one I witnessed last week. Or maybe the dirt was spread across the ground by heavy machinery to level the clearing and fill in the puddled tire ruts. Either that or it was pushed down the side of the ravine. I can't tell. What little is left of the piles seems to have migrated closer to the ravine.

I look down the ravine and even more of it is visible this week. For the first time I think about going down there, taking a little expedition. It didn't seem possible until now. The changing of the seasons is changing the boundaries of this place. Soon the thicket behind the slab logs will be just bare branches, as will the trees in the ravine.

Today the colors are even more vibrant than last time, more oranges and yellows and reds. One of the trees near the entrance strangled by vines - I think it is an oak - is starting to change from the top down and its crown is outlined in russet rust. In the ravine, long bluish-purple seedpods hang from a lime tree. I've never noticed them before but this week they stand out against the backdrop of gold and orange.

Winter has relaxed its grip and the weather is mild, the sky clear blue except for intermittent smudges of white. Some of the smudges are punctuated with short, tight, curving lines like comets tails, rising up at sharp angles. Maybe these are pieces of plane trails. The smudge-and-line groupings throughout the sky create little vignettes, almost unrelated to one another. My dad said once of a sky like this, "If someone painted it nobody would think it looked real."

I walk over to the slabs to tell Stephen it's time to go. Just as we're taking one last look around the clearing, two men drive up in a white truck. The go over to the largest dirt pile, the one farther down, past the mostly-gone small piles, and start to shovel soil from it into a brown plastic bag. These are different men than the ones I talked to last time. We take their appearance as our cue to leave, and I realize too late that I should have talked to them and asked them what they were going to do with the soil.

Response 7: Blue Iris

Mary Oliver writes about nature one flower or tree or (dare I say it) weed at a time. Her approach is close-up and species-specific. In this way she reminded me a little bit of Nancy Gift. Within a given poem, there is not exactly a strong sense of the environment surrounding the plant life she focuses on. Oliver sets her poems in fields, dunes, swamps and rivers, among others, but these are not as specific as Ray’s longleaf pine forest or Abbey’s Arches National Monument or Lamberton’s desert. In general Oliver does not mention a specific state or geographic region or even country in her poems. Taken together though, the plant life and environments she evokes in this collection of poems create a larger sense of place, one that is lacking in any individual poem by itself. Still, the places she describes are not that specific. They feel vaguely like the northeastern United States, but she doesn’t hammer home the particular location like many other nature writers do. I wondered if this was in order to give her poems more of a universal resonance.

I also wondered about how this relates to activism, and whether her poems can be considered activist. The only time she mentions a state specifically in Blue Iris is in “A Blessing,” the essay about summers spent with a friend in a state park near Clarion, and even then she doesn’t name the park itself. It is also in this essay that she most closely approaches a show-us-the-destruction kind of activism. “A Blessing” contains a gut-wrenching encounter with a strip-mine. Her other poems exhibit a different kind of activism I think, the kind that celebrates the pleasures of cut flowers in a vase or a walk in the woods rather than highlighting human destruction. Oliver’s poems aren’t outright accusatory, but they contain conservationist undercurrents. She often addresses her poems to "you" and thus implicates her readers, asking them to consider the content of her poems on a personal level.

Oliver says in “Upstream”: “the sunflowers themselves [are] far more wonderful than any words written about them.” This quote reveals an essential tension within her work: her awareness of the inadequacy of poetry (and language) to capture the natural world. She seems torn between throwing off worldly concerns to enjoy nature and listening to “ambition”: “And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists / of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money, / I don’t even want to come in out of the rain” (5). Perhaps “to sell my life for money” refers to the endeavor of poetry and her identity as poet. If so then the paradox is that she does come in out of the rain; that she does write her poems and sell her life for money.

Of all the poems in this collection, “The Oak Tree at the Entrance to Blackwater Pond” resonated with me most. This poem had a stronger sense of place than most others; I felt that I could use this poem as a map and find the exact tree it described, recognizing it as well as the feelings it inspired. This poem concerned a deeply-felt connection with one particular tree rather than a whole species. I couldn’t attach myself to many of her other poems because they often felt too general. Also, sometimes they seemed too optimistic and happy and didn’t resonate with me as much. This one is darker; not so accepting. In this poem, Oliver allows herself to mourn, to be “...tired of that brazen promise: / death and resurrection.” The affirmation she often finds in the cycle of death and rebirth is questioned; it fails to comfort.

I appreciated “The Oak Tree…” because it increased the specialness of the tree it is about, giving it dimension and meaning and heart. In Blue Iris, it was rare for Oliver to bring in anything not of the natural world and I found the use of Osiris to be so refreshing. Osiris served as a lovely metaphor for the oak tree, for death and rebirth and their complexities. I saw him on his dark boat in my imagination and felt the longing in that image. This poem also seemed to be shaped like a tree: the centered type created an effect like a trunk.

Reading Mary Oliver made me think about the first poem I wrote, which was about daffodils, one specific flower, like her poems in that way. The first spring flowers in my mother's garden were crocuses and daffodils. The crocuses were small and fragile and often froze mid-bloom, but the daffodils bloomed hearty and abundant, one of my mother's favorites. All of my early poems were about the natural world. Thinking about that, I wrote the following poem. Hadn't written a poem in a long time, years and years. I guess this is called "First Poem":

I took out the poem now but if you'd like to read it just let me know :)

Place 6: Dark Comfort

October 13, 2009 2:45 pm

Two blazing orange maple trees face the entrance to the cemetery, radiating light like lanterns into the overcast day.

On my way to the clearing I stopped to talk to two groundskeepers who were planting small shrubby trees on one of the plots. They told me the trees are American holly, paid for by the family that owns the plot and its mausoleum. Families of the deceased often pay for small-scale landscaping around the gravesites while the cemetery fund pays for plantings of large trees. I learned from the groundskeepers that the microburst which hit Pittsburgh in June 2002 felled over three hundred trees in the cemetery and it closed for all but essential activities (such as funerals) for two or three months while they cleaned up. As I walked through the cemetery afterwards I noticed all the tree stumps scattered throughout the grounds - I had never noticed that before. "Either we're putting 'em in or cutting 'em down," one of the men said. The other man said he loves working outdoors, especially during this season. "But check back with me in February, if you're still out walking then," he teased.

I couldn’t resist asking about the clearing; this was the chance I’d been waiting for. I tried to sound casual, but I'd been formulating the questions in my mind for weeks. I asked about the piles of dirt and found out I was right: they're made mostly of dirt taken out of graves to make room for the caskets. The smaller groundskeeper leaned his chin on the handle of his shovel while we talked and told me that the marble slabs and tumbled old headstones in the clearing have been “reclaimed” from collapsed mausoleums and graves. They will be reused in future building. They save everything here, he said. The clearing, then, is more like a recycle bin or a junkyard than a dump.

If mausoleums fall down and families can’t afford to pay for the repairs, they have to be torn down and the bodies moved and buried in the ground. This revelation struck me as rather cold and grisly; it seems even the dead can be foreclosed upon. I asked how much a mausoleum costs these days and he said that for a twelve or twenty-four person crypt it’s about half a million dollars. And an amount equal to the purchase price has to be given as an endowment for its future maintenance. This is to prevent circumstances like the one above.

In college I learned about a practice called split inheritance among the Inca kings. After a king died, his successor inherited his title and power but none of his land or wealth. An Inca ruler retained possession of his lands and riches and servants even in death, and elaborate cults of worship were established around the ruler's mummy. The mummy attended ceremonies and banquets and went to visit friends. I often think of the Inca rulers when I come to the cemetery because to a lesser degree we are not so very different. Learning about the half-million dollar mausoleums and endowments drove this point home even more. So much wealth and property are tied up in our dead. This is true in many cultures. There's a cemetery near Cairo where people have moved into their family crypts due to scarcity and cost of housing. A whole community lives there now; there's even mail service.

A bracing wind blew today and by the time I got to the clearing by ears were painfully cold even underneath the hood of my sweatshirt which I held closed under my chin with one hand as I walked. Although the tire tracks and mud are still there, the sight doesn’t bother me or look ugly and ruined anymore. Maybe because I’m expecting it. Today I found some other tracks too, possibly left by deer, each track divided in two like a hoof. I could see them in the places where tire tracks left behind furrows of soft mud. I tried to take a picture but my camera was out of batteries and shut off. I took this as a cue to ease up on the photos this week.

I approached the edge of the clearing where the land falls off the ragged side of a ravine and looked down. Now that some of the leaves have fallen from the tangle of branches at the bottom of the cliff I can see it much more clearly; it is no longer just a tangled mess of undergrowth. I hadn’t anticipated this enhanced view and it’s a wonderful surprise. I wonder at the things I’ll soon be able to see as more leaves fall. Halfway down the ravine a tree lies horizontal, too far away to tell what kind it is. Maybe next time I’ll bring some binoculars to get a better view. Near the downed tree a small maple glows bright yellow, and high above its canopy a larger maple blazes its crown of orange. Two bluebirds chase each other against the fiery backdrop of the maple. The cool, crisp blues and grays of the birds' plumage flicker their melody of flight against the bright orange leaves.

The majority of the other trees still have their leaves and have yet to change color. It strikes me how much more slowly the leaves seem to be changing this year, and I know it is because I am watching more closely. All the trees don’t turn at once, it is a process in stages and the maples seem to be some of the first. Some of the creeping vines have also begun to change, yellow and crimson seeping in around their edges like paper just fallen into a tub of colored water, still floating on the surface. I have to admit these vines are beautiful, despite the suffocating effect I noted two weeks ago.

I take a deep breath in through my nose and faintly smell the soil piled near the ravine. The scent is half wet and rich and loamy, half dry and tickly, making me twitch my nose. Along the perimeter of the clearing opposite the ravine a dense lawn-like grass covers a swath of land twenty feet long and two feet wide. The scent on this side is sharp and sweet. I only smell these scents when I inhale deeply. Otherwise the wind seems to blow them right past me, numbing my nostrils.

Layers of dense clouds hang in the sky, shades of white and blue and lavender and deep gray. For some reason these clouds seem comforting today, soft and close and even kind. I feel supported by them, as if by an embrace from a soft, quiet mother. I know dark clouds signify rain but nothing seems threatening about them. Today the sky is a place for my eyes to rest, not the reflective panel of white that repels the eyes on so many Pittsburgh days. The dark clouds, unexpectedly, are what create this ease.

Response 6: Beyond Desert Walls

I have to admit that I struggled with Beyond Desert Walls. This was largely due to aspects of Lamberton's persona that bothered me. I think this book presents a unique set of challenges because the author is a convicted criminal. As a reader, I found myself grappling with his criminal actions throughout the text, even though they were not always addressed directly. In this way, I'm sure the book reflected his state of mind while he was writing: struggling with his crime in indirect ways. I was glad that Lamberton addressed his reasons for being in prison in the introduction because otherwise that would have been on my mind the whole time. So, instead of wondering what crime he committed, I found myself focusing more on how he was dealing with it.

The premise – nature essays written from prison – immediately intrigued me, but it didn't really play out like my preconceptions thought it would. Before reading, I think I was envisioning essays written about the view of the landscape from a narrow window, or perhaps memories of time spent in nature. While both of those elements played large roles in the text, I didn't understand how integral Lamberton's prison mentality would be. Lamberton’s personality, especially his flaws and struggles, is so tied up with the essays in this book. The desert landscape acts like a movie screen onto which he projects his internal world of thoughts and feelings. This was an aspect of the book that I thought Lamberton rendered quite elegantly.

But at times the book felt so self-absorbed and self-critical that it was difficult to take. After thinking about it more, I suppose this is part of the point of the book. Sprung from the mind and heart of a prisoner, his tortured mental state is clear on every page, in very subtle ways. It is so subtle that I'm not sure if it was intentional or just unavoidable. I found this effect to be much more poignant than his projection of his inner feelings onto the landscape. I thought this was most apparent in the way he focused on mishaps created by his machismo – which seems clearly related to his affair and eventual capture.

Unfortunately Lamberton's personality, in the way he portrayed himself, really put me off at times. All of the showboating with the snakes, needless risks from spider bites – this type of thing irritated me. His machismo affected my ability to appreciate his stories and maybe that is my own shortcoming. When a narrator presents himself honestly, with all his flaws, shouldn’t that make him more trustworthy? Shouldn't I be more understanding and forgiving as a reader? I was surprised to find myself condemning him at times much like the justice system had.

Lamberton's rendering of Karen also bothered me. Poor Karen, I thought more than once. She not only put up with the affair and his prison term and spent years trying to win his release, but she also endured the public sharing of the story in his writing, with her as a main character. Lamberton often voiced Karen's thoughts and feelings, and it was unclear to me how much of this was coming from her and how much was his own opinion. Over and over again he emphasized her need for control and psychologized her in a way that seemed heavy-handed. I would like to hear her side of the stories.

Throughout the book I asked myself how much of my distrust and negative reaction to Lamberton was the result of my opinion about his crime. I tried to be open-minded about his affair but I’ve also been a fourteen-year-old girl, and I know the vulnerability of that age. I think part of me is angry at Lamberton for abusing his power with that girl. I know fourteen-year-old girls can be devious and powerful in their own way, but still. He suffered greatly during his twelve years in jail and I appreciate his attempt at finding redemption as well as the role that writing played in this attempt.

As I thought further about my negative reaction to Lamberton-as-character, I realized that it might have less to do with my contempt for his crime and more to do with the fact that he wrote "to unwittingly punish" himself (xvii). I think this self-punishment emerges as brutal honesty about his own flaws and shortcomings, and that this is tough and disturbing for a reader to handle. Writing teachers always say you have to love your characters if you want others to love them. In this case, I'm not sure if Lamberton loves his character, and perhaps that's why I found it hard to. I eventually came to accept him, grudgingly, and to appreciate his struggle and respect his way of trying to cope with it. If I struggled this much as a reader I can only imagine how Lamberton struggles to accept himself. This tension is what gave the book its power and uniqueness.

Place 5: Fear

Tuesday October 6, 2009 6:51 pm

Nothing worried me about coming to the cemetery after five pm. I know it closes to cars at that time but pedestrians can seemingly always get in. When I entered the gates today it wasn’t even seven. But the sky was overcast with endless folds of clouds, and darkness fell early. It wasn’t the cemetery itself that made me feel uneasy; I don’t fear the dead. A young man wearing a backpack passed me on the road to the clearing, moving in the opposite direction. He looked lean and rumpled, sure of foot, perhaps walking a little too quickly. The wind rustling through the leaves muffled the sound of his retreating footsteps so that I had to peek over my shoulder to make sure he was still walking away. Then two joggers, men – they seemed okay. Two men together seems safer than one alone; jogging more trustworthy than lean walking.

By this time my body was tight with fear and I was walking faster than a comfortable pace. I saw the brown outline of an animal out of the corner of my eye and it made me jump. In my peripheral vision it looked like a small bear or a gigantic groundhog. But as I approached it raised its graceful head: only a deer, but when it saw me it bolted. The deer in the cemetery are usually so tame. Last week a group of six didn't move a muscle as I passed in my car.

I continued down the road skittishly and too quickly. I turned into the clearing.

Okay, there it is, dirt, trees, snaggled weeds, yellow grass, click-click camera, I’m outta here.

I walked out through the mouth of the clearing instead of doubling back and out the car-gate like I usually do, hoping to find a shortcut and get out quicker. It may have been a bad time to try a new shortcut, but my instincts delivered me, safely, if out of breath, onto the right path and eventually out of the cemetery.

This week I only took two pictures. Pretty good considering I didn't even stop walking. I had only planned to post one picture this week anyway. After last week I felt sick of pictures, like there were too many and they were taking over the blog, getting in the way of my thoughts and descriptions. I'm undecided about the pictures. Part of me says: Use this medium, post pictures. But another part of me says: This should be about the writing.

I've avoided writing about my fear up to this point. I've tried hard to focus my entries on the clearing, to stop the pull of my relentlessly associative mind away from the present moment. I've pushed aside memories and daydreams in favor of trying to concentrate on the landscape, to immerse myself in my surroundings. Today the clearing was just a hallway. I was too afraid to stop and look around. Seeing the picture now I feel such regret.

Response 5: Sick of My Own Voice

In the spirit of this week's reading, here's my rant. It's short because I'm too tired to write a longer one. I'm casting all pleasantries aside.

I've been having this issue for a while, with my voice, with authenticity, especially as it relates to this blog, a sort of public journal. When I go to my place I try to write a continuous journal entry, but sometimes I just jot down notes or make voice recordings or mentally record impressions. Sometimes I come to the clearing with preconceived ideas about what I'd like to write about. Invariably I change what I write in my journal before I post it on this blog, adding and deleting and polishing. I know that this is part of the assignment, and also part of being a writer: translating the raw thought, the thought which may not even be made of words. It's a frustrating thing, and it doesn't feel authentic sometimes. How much of my internal landscape to reveal? How to best reveal it?

I'm sick of my own voice, my internal writing voice. I'm sick of the rhythm of my sentences. I'm sick of polishing my thoughts before sharing them. It's confusing and it makes me forget what I really think. I'm sick of censoring myself, of saying nothing prettily. If you can't think of anything to say then just say nothing prettily. I thought up that advice tonight and gave it to myself. That's what I feel like I'm doing sometimes. Sometimes I'd like to say something ugly instead, meaning: I'd like to say something substantial, in an ugly way.

Now we can all tell it's late at night. Too late for me to polish and the censors have fallen asleep. So I post this now, my optional mini-rant.

Place 4: Ruin

Friday October 2, 2009 2:47 pm

My first thought upon arriving here today: the clearing is a mess. The dirt is ravaged by tire treads, the landscape torn as if clawed up by huge nails. Track marks from car tires circle and crisscross and sickly orange puddles have filled in the deeper tracks. The clearing looks ruined.

The birds are deafening. It sounds like a jungle or a rainforest or the inside of an aviary. Continuous chatter punctuated by squawks and shrieks; everybody talking at once.

It’s raining pretty hard today, so I drove my car into the cemetery and down curving roads to get here. I parked right in front of the gate. Even if they gate weren’t there I would never drive into the clearing. It felt sacrilegious enough driving this far, and the knowledge of my tires on the pavement churned in my stomach. Not quite sure why. Maybe it’s because I’ve only driven into cemeteries for funerals, or to visit a grave. Otherwise I walk in. The walk to the clearing is part of why I picked this spot and it felt bad to miss that too, like I was cheating. And it was strange seeing the familiar sights along the way from my car. Everything seemed smaller and more distant, separate from me.

Standing in the ruined clearing now, my drive in and the tire-torn ground seem connected, like voodoo. Like somehow my tires on the pavement carved up this land.

I wonder where my meditation rock is – I don’t see it anywhere. With the landscape so ruptured I wonder if it’s been plowed up or overturned or tumbled down the hillside. It was in the middle of the clearing but I can’t find it today. Oh, there it is, barely distinguishable. It blends in with the torn up ground. The little foxtail grass that tapped me on the shoulder is down in the mud, crushed. The birds have quieted.

Where the ground is unbroken it looks like the bottom of a lake exposed and the pebbles are even more beautiful and multicolored than last week.

I just stood in one place for too long and when I moved my feet the ground clung to my soles like quicksand, a creepy feeling. I begin to pace the clearing; if I stand still my feet will start to sink again. Because of the rain, I’m talking into my voice recorder instead of writing, holding it and my camera by turns beneath my umbrella. Both are getting wet anyway. It’s strange to talk to myself in this place. I feel like a secret spy or a schizophrenic or both. I talk to myself when I’m alone sometimes, but not in paragraphs.

Pacing around I am drawn again to the vines overtaking everything. Some are more like lianas than vines, with thick, woody, interminably long stems. Much of the greenery here seems to come from the vines and lianas. On the gated side of the clearing, two huge trees are totally overcome. They look like gigantic topiaries. The one on the left looks like a creature walking upright, pack on his back like a turtle’s shell, muscular, maybe a traveler, tattered tunic, skull for a face.

I approach the skull traveler, a large oak, much too big to put my arms around. A woody tendril encircles it. The sight is almost gory, obscene somehow. I want to look away.

I step outside the gate to examine the other side of its trunk. An ivy creeps up it from the ground – but on first impulse it looks so much like a snake that I recoil. It cuts a cruel channel into the bark of the oak and sprouts little heart-shaped leaves, almost mockingly. I feel the creepingness of it in my body.

In the even bigger trunk of a nearby maple, another type of liana has had its way with the tree. Tens of squirmy stems pulse their way up the trunk. And on the other side I see lianas growing from the earth up and over the branches, anchoring them to the ground like ropes. The upward pull of the branches is palpable, uncomfortably tight.