English Assignment

Written hastily in the early hours of the morning prior to class, so it's kind of crappy. Forgive me.

I love writing free-form stuff. (Relatively, anyway; I dislike writing in general.) Last-year English can suck it with its CQC's.

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“Nature” Write

I am sitting on a bench, looking out on the bay. I watch the gentle undulations of the cobalt-blue water, and the little brown ripples that appear where they catch the sunlight. I hear the soft sound of miniature waves breaking on the shore, and see the moving white lines on the water that appear every few feet outward, lengthening as they travel toward me, and then fading into nothing against the pebbles and rock. I feel a gentle breeze that not only stirs the bay's waters, but also tickles my hair and the stalks of the dry yellow plants growing along the trail. The wind and the waters are constantly in motion; the wrinkles on the water's surface create ever-changing patterns. In contrast, the sky is static, a still expanse of blue.

I see something green in the water near me, some kind of plant that I did not notice earlier. There are three patches of them, half-submerged in the bay, and the farthest one is continually diving underneath the surface, reappearing as the water changes, and repeating the motion with each new wave. A seagull flies across my field of vision, diving low towards the water, then ascending again, away to my right. Behind it, farther in the distance, I see ten or twenty flying white specks – could they be its friends? Soon, they disappear against the lightness of the background, and a minute later I can see no trace of them, no sign that they were ever there.

Occasionally, I hear the rush of a passing car behind me or an airplane preparing to land at the airport, or see the long shadow of a biker passing on the trail. Even though they are close enough for me to see and hear, they do not waste a second to look at what is right in front of them. I am reminded of my quick write, where I wrote that I enjoy nature in theory, but never take the time to actually experience it. Now I realize this holds true for many of us. The people in the cars behind me do not have nature on their agenda; they have something else to do and somewhere else to go. I, too, have somewhere else to go. In the mornings I ride the bus to school, which drives along the very road behind me. Sometimes I see this same bay, and look at it only superficially; sometimes, my eyes stay inside the bus and I do not see it at all. Yet the road is only some twenty, thirty feet away from this bench. Here, it surrounds and refreshes me; there, it has no more significance than the fly on the window. Perspective makes all the difference.

In his essay Emerson refers to the “lover of nature”, and implies that this is a permanent state, that either a person is or is not able to experience nature. I disagree with this view; everyone can have a relationship with the natural world, but only when they take the time to do so. It is not that “few adult persons can see nature”, but that few, at any given time, feel like taking it in. Anyone can become the “transparent eyeball” and breathe in nature, and many of them, at some time or other, do decide to do so. Most do not even have to travel far, or isolate themselves from society; nature can be found in many places, even less than a minute's walk or a second's glance from civilization, if one decides to look for it. All that is needed is to open your eyes.

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tl;dr: I go stare at some water and totally have this profound revelation that'll change my life forever.

And I just realized a sad fact. Thinking "I'm going to post this on VuTales" was better motivation for writing this than "I'm going to turn this in to my teacher and get points for it". Or maybe it was the two combined being more than the sum of its parts, I dunno.