Starting Over

Most people don't enjoy walking in the rain and most people get depressed and find the rain as a sort of bearer of bad news. Today, I found the rain to be the most essential to purge myself of the feelings that I have been experiencing lately. It always seems that when everything is going good in your life, you forget about all the bad times in your life and all the times that you feel like life is collapsing. When things in your life aren't going very well, it seems as though everything comes to a point and everything collapses and you experience the worst of feelings and you find yourself wishing that life would change. During my walk this evening, I found myself shuddering in my clothes, chilled from the night air and the rain that kept falling on me. The sky was a grayish eerie smear of dark rain clouds and the sky was pouring down ont top of me. I felt so insignificant in those fifteen minutes and felt as if my mind was going to expolde from playing all the negative things playing over in my mind from the last few weeks. Life is funny like that, and it almost seems as if nature knows when you need something to give you a push, something to help you get by. I took my hood off, looked up to the dark sky and let the rain fall on my face. I felt myself teary in the moment, by the more I looked to the sky, the more the raindrops seemed to wash away what was happening inside. It was like wiping the slate clean, a new beggining to the next few weeks of my life. It's funny how we try to control things in our life like our emotions and the events that make us feel sad, happy, bad and good. Sometimes, it takes us realizing that there are forces bigger than us that control the aspects of our lives that we can't, and sometimes, nature offers us a way out, a way to escape life for a moment. Today, that was the rain.

The part of today's reading that stood out to me the most today was when Leopold was in the section titled, "Axe-in-Hand." Leopold starts this passage by saying, "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, but he is no longer the only one to do so. When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver; he could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he became a taker: he could chop it down. Whoever owns land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine functions of creating and destroying plants" (pg. 67). I found this so interesting because it really got me thinking about how as humans, some of us invest in the idea that there is higher being that controls all, but even still, we try to control all aspects of our lives, as well as other people's lives around us. The "ancestor" in this passage represents a universal idea of humans, all mankind together. The "shovel" represents mankind's ability to give things back to the enviorment to use in everyday life, things that we in a way may take for granted and other things that we use to control our lives, such as what we choose to eat, in the case of Leopold, "plant a tree." The "axe" represents mankind's ability to take away things from the enviorment, especially without intent to replace them, such as choosing what to kill and what to take for ourselves, also in the case of Leopold, "chop it down." Henceforth, because the universal human, "owns land," we therefore have a sort of godlike ability to control nature or rather, "the divine functions of creating and destroying plants." This got me thinking back to my walk and how we as humans always try to control everything in life, especially nature and the things that we take and what we choose to give back. It seems as when we need to be reminded that there are certian things in life that we can't control and that we can't always play God, nature takes over and uses it upper hand, grounding us again and reminding us that we can't always have control. I think that we would do well to try and understand this more, rather than always thinking that we control every aspect of our lives. Perhaps we would appreciate life more, especially the things that nature has to offer.