Entry 8: First Snow

Crunching along in the snow, something feels so final. Maybe it's the time. It's the end of the semester. The year is almost over. The lush, enveloping green appears to be gone for good. White snow and brown vines and trunks are everywhere. It almost looks like a prison, but I don't like thinking about it in this way. It was so cold yesterday in the wind that I felt my legs begin to go numb. The biting cold reminded me of that chapter in "Forest Unseen" where he stripped himself down and sat in the snow and nearly suffered frostbite and hypothermia. I'm all about experimentation, however that's just a little too extreme for me still at this juncture. I go about as far as taking my glove off and picking up a small handful of snow and watch it melt in my palm.

A week or so ago, I had already thought that things were so vast and almost suppressed. The grass that stood in tall thicks now was nowhere to be found. Snow now covered everything. The only thing not snow were thorn bushes and empty tree trunks. The trees were empty, but not in a sad way. They seemed okay with their plight, they continued to stand and exist just as they always had. The only things that seemed to be taking this new weather so personally was the aforementioned grass and greenery that used to lurk about. I thought maybe I would see a deer or a rabbit, or even a grouse. I heard coyotes the other night, but didn't hope to run into any of them. No one showed up though, and it was just me with myself.


I looked down, where papa’s stone should be and couldn’t see it see-well the now fragments of it. I dug through the snow anyways until I hit the remnants. I can't let myself forget . . .

Even though it was almost too cold even for me, and I was alone which was something I used to have a bigger problem with, I was okay. I felt . . . sturdy. I felt like I was where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to be doing. I envisioned the grass and other plants that used to be around; the goldenrod, the queen ann's lace, and suddenly I thought of a kind of exciting and mostly childlike analogy. I was excited for spring but not so much that I would wish the winter away-I know there are things in store for me to discover in the snow. I thought though, that the spring is like nature's Christmas. It's when everything is unwrapped and revealed that we've been anticipating for what's felt like ages. Every year, nature knows just what to give and is exuberantly wonderful and different each time. We'll just have to wait and see.

This place, and this act of coming here has become so important to me. I am grateful for this place, and for this assignment. I was surprised about the ways in which this place has changed me. In the beginning I thought maybe I would be so lucky as to learn new things about nature, and enjoy the plants and things I saw, but I learned so much more than that in these few months. The changes I observed seemed to be so much more dramatic than I ever remembered. Yes, this is mostly because I had never paid such close attention before, but there was something else about it. Nature had seemed to be teaching me things about myself. I learned in this place that things come and go-and how to accept and be okay with that. I also realized here too though that somethings are never really gone. I learned how to create my own new connections with my surroundings and things I thought were lost. I learned that it's okay to not have all the answers all the time, I don't have to know everything all the time.

And I think one of the most important things, to me, that I learned in this assignment is not to underestimate nature, and that it always has something completely new for me to see, explore, and learn about.

I love this ground.