Openings

A misconception coming into this class: nature doesn't care about me (or you, he, she, it, they). 

Perhaps “care,” is still not the right word, but to be sure, nature responds to me (you, he, she it, they).

***

In Cameroon for a semester of studying abroad, I was treated royally. During lunch, my class and I ate in the teacher’s cafeteria where we were served by waitresses. Outside, Cameroonian students stopped to get glimpses of us.

Visiting a Palm oil plant, we were treated to lunch in the owner’s  home: a manicured blue stucco ranch. Unable to find a trash can to throw away my wrapped feminine product, I suspected one behind the swinging door from which waitresses (maids? servants?) busily emerged with Fanta and sliced pineapples.

I pushed into the kitchen and met twenty confused then accommodating eyes. I asked for a trashcan.

This was Francophone Cameroon, said the once again confused eyes. Then I held it up.

There was no trash can in that kitchen, I admitted to myself, long after I handed that thing to a young man who took it with a bow.

Sometimes, like today, I wonder about what happened when I turned my back on them, pleased and horrified at the same time. 

But here’s the thing, I know what happened, or at least I think I know. Whatever the exact details, the transaction has too much ugliness to count.

I can still hear the way that door swung behind me, how it swung back in forth between the room we sat, and the kitchen where they stood. The swings lessened in momentum until the passageway was once again resealed.

***

At Nine Mile the overflow valve held up those swaths of toilet paper, where should I put this, it asked.

***

Tonight, I look up to the night sky. I am sad. 

Bogard said we've lost the ability to see the dimmest of stars, which exist in the furthest dimension. And I can’t help but wallow in this shining metaphor, how we are losing our ability to see into the furthest wells of our dimensions.

***

The air is crisp, sharp, and sure of itself. It hugs me here at my corner, holds me in place. I feel as if I am sitting in a car seat, strapped in. 

And perhaps this is what I've been missing, this feeling of nature's hold: its infiniteness, it’s coddling, my infancy.

I hear vehicles. Their motors come and go from unseen horizons of sound. A constant buzz hums in the air. It’s an engine, but on a larger scale. It’s an engine that approximates all this city’s sounds, as if all far off noises rise to its hovering valves, and out comes the discernible reminder of man kind: echos between voice and steel.

***

The Robitussin box, which I wrote about earlier in a winter blog, teeters at the ledge of the rain drain near my feet. I walk to the dumpster, dropping it in.

For a moment, I feel like I've made a difference.

Then that guilt comes lapping around  an unseen corner in my mind--courtesy of my Catholic imprints-- reminding me that my effort is in vain: instead of polluting the waterways, I've contributed to the landfill.

As I reopen the dumpster lid,  in my mind’s eye appears that swinging Cameroonian door.

I look at the soft box of Robitussin, and consider my options.

See See See

Today, while reading the syllabus, looking for Sheryl’s office hours, I re-read the course’s holy grail quote:

“If a man's imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited, he would…learn to perceive in water, leaves and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvelous, more than enough to console him for the loss of the ancient dreams.”

Today I will go to my spot and I will look/perceive as I have never perceived before. I will be the hand that holds my head to acknowledge.

I pride myself on my imagination, why am I then, so resistant to try alternative pathways to imagination, i.e. sitting and perceiving in nature? Why don’t I trust it? Is this true?

I’ve felt the spark in small glimpses-- this nature inspired imagination, and certainly felt the imaginative in the nature readings (Kincaid, Oates, Rogers, Doyle, and Clifton, all kind of made me writhe on the floor in admiration).

Nature enhances creativity…Hm.
Writing this out just now, may have revealed a misdirection: nature enhances creativity=look to nature for its handouts. And this, more than anything reveals my poverty mentality.

Even so, this seems to be a conundrum. Nature does inspire creativity, but at the same time I can’t expect it to inspire creativity… when I do, nothing comes of it, and my mind happily skips to the nearest human or drama (which honestly speaking is a reliable source of imaginative thinking and creativity according to my brain's wiring). Ah. this reveals something now seemingly obvious, I resist nature writing because I'm not "good" at it (pathetic, I know), which is why I took this class in the first place.

I've managed to run back into my head. Lets try nature again.

Today I will go and document like a mad scientist, the things I have not until today, wanted to see. Today I will perceive in leaves.

                                       ***

Siobhan’s semi-scientific notes

(which will be later layered with the help of the internet)

-The lens: Me. 28 year old female

-Place: 500 block of Coal St. Pittsburgh PA 15221. The alley between apartment building and The Garden Manor Mental health care home

-Time: 6pm, dusk

-Weather: Deceptively cold, 34 degrees, Cloudless dimming blue sky

- The birds: Three. Hopping around on the mental home's well trimmed for winter lawn. Their legs are hidden in the grass, making it appear as if they’re floating on grass. They’re pecking here and there. Seeds? American Robins. Turdus migratorius

                             

-Trees: Way more than I originally thought

Ash trees. Transparent slender clumps of leaves with visible darker seed inside. Look like clumps of band-aids with a circle of blood/injury. Fraxinus

                   

Maple trees. According to the helicopter leaves I find on the ground. Holy happy childhood memory.  Catholic elementary school, 1991. Acer

Elm trees.  Says the leaves picked from the collage of fallen soldiers, still hugging in death. Ulmas

-Moss: This covers some of the ground at the base of the line of trees. It seeps onto the lime green wooden planks which mark the borders of the alley. Anomodon viticulosus

Plus, a tuft of onion grass!  I pluck some of it's top hair and inhale it's poignant memory. Romulea rosea

                                                  ***

My mom works at a Headstart program in in the Poconos. She’s told me of a device the teachers use on child who can’t sit still, can’t look into things for too long: the weighted vest, or "sensory hug." I like the two very different implications behind these names.

                                                     ***

In what ways have I approached nature this semester? When/how/why has nature acted as a weighted vest for me? How has it acted as a sensory hug ?

When/how/why have I been a weighted vest upon nature? How have I been a sensory hug for nature? (I just imagined nature yelling at me in a cutting, abrupt voice, "I don't need your sensory hug!).

                                                                               ***

I have come to these assignments as:

an explorer, a disbeliever, a believer, a mule, a mourner, a child, an adult, an artist, a cynic, a psychic, a writer, a fallen leaf, a leaf still holding on, an idealist, a realist, a student, a teacher, an insider, an outsider, a hippi, a hip hopper, an energy, a void. 

An (anticlimactic) human.

Poem

Human

Humanity

Human in a tee

In my white tee

Tree staring

Nature blog writing

steady

trying to circle me:

A sailor(ess) went to 

sea sea sea

To see what she could 

see see see

But all that she could 

see see see

all that she could

per

ceive ceive ceive

was the lossses of her

ancient 
dreams

dreams 

dreams

*all images from internet

Disclaimers and Dr.Pepper

3-11-4

6:08 pm

First, let’s address the disclaimers.

Disclaimer: This is my third time out this week to collect myself through nature writing. Every day, as the weather improves, I can’t help but to think, so will my writing (I am a superstitious writer). Here’s the thing, I am obsessively searching/on the lookout for new angles to write from. I know that this warm tease of weather will bring out new ideas, plus I’m reflecting nature’s cue, feeling refreshed myself. Lately, I’ve been suffocating in my winter tone.

  Disclaimer: I am writing long hand today A.) because I can stand to, temperature wise and B.) more importantly, I’m trying to stack up my chicken scratch in this specific notebook, my notebook from jail.

Last week, one of eleven students/men did their homework (three pages of “whatever you want”-- I know, this open endedness is probably part of the problem).  So, I had to get up on my soap box real quick and tell them about themselves (this is truly an art. You cannot be the yakkity yak bully public school teacher, but you also want/expect for them to do some work).

Next, my student asked, “Siobhan, where’s your three pages?”

Trying to save face, I passed him this scarcely written in notebook.

He says, “This not three pages,” smiles, and hands it back to me.

I told him (after sucking my teeth), “Come to my school Brandon. I’ll show you fifty plus pages.”

He caught me, and I was glad he did.

Never preach what you don’t practice. More accurately, be able to back up the practice you preach.  Even though I easily had more than three pages of writing sitting inside my school bag, inside the car which sat outside of the jail at that very moment, there was no way to prove that I had kept up my end of the bargain. He wasn’t trying to hear it, just as I wasn’t trying to hear why he or his classmates couldn’t produce three pages.

***

So here I am at my corner.

Different weather (warmer)

Different smell (the faint undertone of fresh dog poop-- juicer)

Different sounds (“I’m about to pop you! You know not to go in the street!”)

Said the woman in a tight purple shirt walking a pit bull, to one of her three children. They passed earlier on their way to the corner store.

Humans dominate in noise making when the weather gets warmer. We want to make sure we still got lungs that work, want to make sure the long corridors of streets are capable of carrying our voice like the dusty telephone lines above our head. Cabin fever is a hell of a disease (in the voice of Charlie Murphy).

People and dogs galore.

Do you remember the original/animated 101 Dalmatians? In the opening credits, shown are owners walking their dog which looks like them: the lanky and pointy nosed bun wearing librarian is walking the lanky and pointy nosed grey hound (are grey hounds exceptionally smart? I suspect this is the suggestion here). Then there’s the squat bald Danny DeVito looking  man who, you guessed it, is walking Squat the bull dog.

My point: why is this theory so damn accurate?

In the Islands (St. Lucia) there was one main breed of dog: a mangy nervous rat looking mutt thing (sadly, starvation had a lot to do with this look), and even here I found my brain adhering to the dog/human theory. St. Lucians, generally speaking, are a nervous/superstitious people who do not have the luxury to keep dogs as pets. These dogs (most which are street dogs) are treated as nuisances. 

Back to America, where we have such things as dog walkers/dog sitters. The thought of a dog walker threw me for a loop when I tried to lay the 101 Dalmatian theory on my imagined female dog walker. Confused, I wondered  which dog out of the her bunch was hers? Any? Then I realized it didn’t matter, the woman was a dog walker. She likes/is all of them. She’s not the reflection of one dog at the end of a leash, she’s the reflection of all/many dogs at the end of a leash.

I used to fantasize about having a yellow, black, and chocolate lab all at once. There’s was something about the sameness and diversity of that bunch, aesthetically speaking, that intrigued me. It's like those murals where a group of differently colored people have their hands in a pile, or a generic ad for a school that needs to include a model/student from each continent in one jolly unifying shot. 

                =    

Holy staged.

I swear I smell hot dogs right now. Someone is really pushing this whole summer feeling thing. I guess that makes two of us.

At my feet sits a crumpled receipt. You know my pandora box opening self is gonna look:

Drum roll please:

Family Dollar

Store # 03675 Wilkinsburg

Dr. Pepper 16 oz. $1.25

Tax .09

Total $1.34

Not the best piece of literature, but it does, as usual, invite me to associate:

Dr. Pepper

Dr. Pib

The bib of American 
drinking

Pop

Soda Pop

Soda

Baby bottles filled with

Cola

Pepsi black

Coke white

Look at you

ready to fight

Face it

Facts

Pacts

with

Corporations

Type two diabetes

in third world nations--

Vacation 
Stations 

Haitians
Banana 
Plantations

Lent the season

of first world

rations