Sarah's Nature Walk With Cronen and Emerson

I went on my nature walk after reading the Cronen article, but before reading Emerson, which I feel gave me a unique perspective. After reading what Cronen had to say about the wilderness, and how the "wilderness, in short, was a place to which one came only against one's will, and always in fear and trembling" (71), I felt many of those same emotions. I took my walk after dark, and although I was in my own neighborhood, I found that I had to overcome an innate fear that I had about being alone in the 'wild', even though I knew I was perfectly safe. The wilderness, and nature in general, has very truly in my mind always been a mixture of beauty and danger. Once I had overcome those fears, I found myself almost sinking back into the scenery, becoming a part of the systems of life I could sense and hear around me. Although Cronen states that as humans we "leave ourself little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like" (81), I felt a part of the ecosystem, acknowledging not only the natural but also nature's reaction to my own presence as a part of the beauty and adaptability of the landscape. I feel that one of the most incredible things about nature is its ability to overcome, like a river that changes its course for the easiest passage as land changes, or a pigeon that learns to build nests atop large buildings. Was not my presence, rather than unnatural, as natural as anything can be? The animals, insects and landscape surely did not see me as an insurmountable unknown, but rather as another variable to enter into their ever-changing equation of survival and life.
After reading Emerson, I found that rather than thinking about nature's reaction to my presence, I began to think more about my reaction to the presence of nature. As a teacher of English, I found that what Emerson had to say about how we frame our own thoughts after natural examples very interesting. Emerson said that "words are signs of natural facts… we say 'heart' to express emotion, the 'head' to denote thought" (18). It made me think of the quote that was mentioned in class that the colors of nature are the 'true' colors, and everything we as humans create that is of color is simply a chemical recreation of these natural colors that occur as if by a miracle everyday in the natural world. The same is true of our own perceptions of beauty, of the mysterious, and of the mystical. Emerson states that "all science has one aim, namely, to find a theory of nature" (8). I find that so incredible when truly contemplated, that we as human beings research continually to discover the 'whys' behind what occurs as simply and subtly in nature as we blink our eyelids or draw breath.