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Woods Journal for 9/18/2022
I am very grateful for the opportunities that this class offers since I am both largely non-educated on the wilderness and haven’t had much of an opportunity to explore the campus woods in my time at Wright State. Learning about the different kinds of flora, fauna, and species around Wright State has been very interesting, especially with Tom Rooney’s walkthrough talking about Doll’s Eyes, types of trees, and the problems that the University has done to the woods in the past few years. Our first walkthrough also included information on stickweed (pictured to the left) the differentiation between old and new growth, and the subject for today’s reflection.
Look at the trees pictured below and ask yourself which tree you notice first, or which one you pay attention to. Most likely, it’s the tree bending through the photo, creating a sort of gate over the path through the woods. All the trees around it are growing straight towards the sky, so the tree growing in this strange way really adds to the scenery of this area. What lessons can we take from the strange bend of this tree?
We can start with the way this tree grows versus the others around it. The foliage here is largely old growth, meaning that these large trees reaching toward the sky have been largely successful, remaining here and growing for at least a few decades. If the trees around it have been successful, does this mean that our tree has been unsuccessful? I don’t think so. Based on the height of this tree, it has also grown for years, and has only recently bent, maybe because of cold pressure from recent winters or other issues.
Similarly, as college students we are often compared to others our age that are viewed as successful, who may be in a “better” major, or seem to have everything figured out. Our path of growth may be different than others around us, but that doesn’t make us unsuccessful. In a field of 100 trees, maybe more, you pay the most attention to the curved tree. In the future, there will be those who judge you, whether it be for a job, promotion, or success. When they study you, maybe your curved growth path will be the most noticeable to them, rather than the others that went straight to the sun.
Woods Journal for 10/16/2022
Woods Journal for 10/16/2022
What happens to us when we die? I don’t mean heaven, hell, or anything religious; I mean what happens to our physical body when we pass away. Recently, our class took a tour through the campus woods here at Wright State, where we passed through Rockafield cemetery. The cemetery has graves of the previous landowners before Wright State bought the land, but it also has a second use, gravesites for bodies donated to the Wright State School of Medicine for Scientific Study. When i first visited it, the place seemed too eerie and creepy, but it interested me.
Revisiting this place when the leaves began to turn orange and red in fall gives the graveyard a different feeling. It was something that I walked through quickly when we toured it as a class, but when I returned here to do research for my Place History assignment, I sat here for nearly an hour, thinking about the decisions that were made to donate a body to science.
I've thought about what I want my life to be like but never thought about what I want when my life is over. I thought that the bodies here would be old people that weren't visited by family members at all, but that wasn't the reality. There were American flags for soldiers, flower bouquets for loved ones, and the most striking one of all, a heartbreaking note for a very young boy, taken from the world far too soon.
These people lived full lives, with loved ones who would regularly visit their graves if they were buried in an ordinary graveyard. So, why were they buried here? Those buried here or those who donate their family members here understand that bodies deserve to be honorably buried, but also understand that when being unselfish, these bodies can be useful to other people, as the engraving above says. I always assumed I would just be buried somewhere random that my loved ones chose, but I think that now I want my body donated. Like the people buried here, I'll never know for sure where I'll go spiritually when I die, but I want whatever is left here to have some use, even if it is small.
Woods Journal for 11/13/22
Today's subject for our reflection is a bit different, but also very strangely symbolic in a lot of ways. Because I had focused on foliage and a location for my first two reflections, I wanted to find an animal for this reflection. On one of the more recent walks with the whole class, so I kept an eye out for the entire walk, looking for a good animal to be a subject of a reflection. But, I couldn't find any good subjects for an hour and a half, and didn't get close to any animals. I started to think of other ideas to do a reflection for, but couldn't come up with anything But, after our professor walked away, I heard a few students start yelling, because they had found the subject for today's reflection.
Look at this adorable little guy. Ironic, Isn't he? I spend an hour and a half looking for animals to do a reflection on, and just when I lose all hope and all patience, there he is, sitting right in the middle of the path. The irony of the animal that I found being a turtle isn't lost on me, that I run out of patience searching for an animal and the one that pops right in front of me is the animal that represents patience.
I'm sure everyone seeing this has some point heard or read the story of the Tortoise and the Hare. I'm not going to talk about patience and the lessons you hear a million times from stories like it as children, I'd like to focus on what could be a second reading of the story, which is the way life sometimes seems to go.
Rather than looking at the story as a tortoise winning a race because his overconfident opponent fell asleep, think of it as the tortoise winning the race because he stayed in the race. Life has a way of working things out, doesn't it? You may be struggling in life right now, but everything in life has worked out enough for you that you are able to view this today.
Even though I was panicking about how I would find an animal and what to do my reflection on, It was fixed only a few seconds later, reminding me that sometimes things work themselves out, we just have to hang in there.
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