You all will have to excuse me, I feel like this post might be a bit sentimental. This week when going on my walk I meandered through town a bit. The leaves all red, orange, and gold gave the town a charm it might not always have, setting up my nostalgia. There are moments here in Farmington that we appreciate more than others, when the leaves change, the first snowfall, and the first warm day of spring. Walking through town made me remember of all the times I had experienced these days over the years. In reading Aldo Leopold I was in someway forced to think about the past.
The reason for this is because of the scene with the tree. When he writes about cutting down the tree readers are able to see the sensitivity that he has. “Fragrant little chips of history spewed from the cut, and accumulated on the snow before the kneeling saywer”(9). I really loved this section as he seemed to recognize the necessity in cutting up the tree, yet, he appreciated what the tree had gone through to grow to be eighty years old.
As a senior I will leave Farmington in may, I have spent four years here. If someone cut me open when I turn eighty(creepy, flashback to last times serial killer) they would have to note my four years here. While walking through town I remembered some weird things from my time here. I remembered not the first time I went to Soup for You, but the time I stormed out of it because I was having a fight. The time I had to leave Narrow Gauge Cinema midway through a movie because my roommate thought she had appendicitis (she didn’t but it was an interesting experience). Anyway I began to appreciated Farmington the way Leopold appreciated the Oak tree.
I thought that Leopold did an excellent job of allowing nature to take part in his writing. He was different than Thoreau, in that he seemed to have more emotion toward nature. Leopold did not preach about nature in the way that Thoreau did. I was able to identify with it more, and think about it more.
In today’s world I think that we are very wrapped up in the taking and consuming of things. We as a culture do not appreciate what goes in to the taking and consuming. Reading this section made me wonder if we stopped to appreciate what was around us, would we be able to consume so much? It seems that we wouldn’t, because if we like Leopold stopped and thought about how many years a tree had lived though every time we wrote on a piece of paper we would not have enough time to consume so much. We would lead cleaner lives and be more in-tune with the past so we could learn from it more.
Rachel I really enjoyed this post! Being a bit of a sentimental, well ok maybe a lot, I definitely find myself relating more and more to Leopold’s ideas of nature through returning, building, and maintaining a relationship to nature. Nature, for many people, is seen as a whole other world and in order to be a part of this world, we must immerse ourselves in it. I believe that this is done through your discussion of the past. When Leopold discusses the section of cutting the tree, he is bringing more than the actual cutting of the tree to our attention. Leopold brings time, the past of the tree and our past as well with nature. When we can look at a tree, such as the one he cuts, and understand and appreciate what this piece of nature has “lived” we are embracing not only the past but a connection to nature.
ReplyDeleteI liked your idea of being “cut open” to reveal what we have inside of us. Our past has made us who we are, for good or for bad, and these layers or “rings”, such as on a tree, are important in our identity. But when we disown or reject our “natural” connection to nature, I believe, that this automatically rejects the life of nature. Too often, as you point out Rachel, we do not stop to appreciate nature, or even the world around us, and we consume so much of our world that our “mortgage finally outgrew their crops”. (57) Thus meaning that our economic world has overrun our natural world. We strive to create these places in which we see “perfect” nature but by doing so “man always kills the thing he loves” and so we destroy what we see to preserve (148). We have become tourists of the land on which we once had so natural a connection. Through time, we see “industrialization” which has changed not only the land but the people. We are now tourists, people not seeking to reconnect with nature but rather to “see” it with our camera in hand. “Parks are made to bring the music to the many, but by the time many are attuned to hear it there us little left but noise.” (pg. 150)