Nature Portfolio

Responses


1. The Earth on Turtle's Back
I love Native American legend stories because its so interesting to me how old and historic they are. It also makes me think about how far back time goes.  These stories have all been passed down through generations orally countless times, so I wonder how much of it has changed and how much has stayed the same.  I also think about how the original authors got their ideas for the story.  Native Americans must have thought that people came from the sky because the women from sky land fell down into water land.  This differs a lot from our origination ideas because nowadays people think heaven is above us and it is something that we ascend to but obviously in Native American times, they descended into the world.This story has a nice moral about how you don't have to be the biggest and strongest to make the biggest difference.  Every animal tried to bring up earth for the woman to land on and failed but finally the muskrat brought it up.  This also symbolizes how much Native Americans depended on animals for natural resources and also how much they cared about them and nurtured them, and got compassion back from them in return.

Word Count: 203 


2. A Corn Planting
This story is a tragedy. I wonder how, in all of Chicago, Will found Hal all because they were from the same town.  They went to different schools and were studying different things.  This is a very unrealistic aspect of the story that I wish the author would have elaborated on a little more. It is very sweet that Hal would read Will's letters to his parents all the time.  Hatch and his wife seemed so busy with their farm, so I am surprised that they would take the precious time out of their harvesting day to drop everything and sit down with Hal to read.  Its actually very very sad that Hatch and his wife never went to see Will because they claimed that they couldn't leave their farm unattended but we all know that if they really wanted to see Will badly enough, they could have hired some farm hands.  Hatch and his wife's reaction to their son's death was absolutely bizarre. I have never heard of anything like it.  They were putting death (seeds) into the ground and hoping that life would grow out of it-in the middle of the night!  It was shocking that within a matter of an hour or so they seemed to get over their sons death.  Since the old man and wife still had their farm and Will's letters, it really wouldn't be much different for them than it was prior to Will's death because they never saw him while he was in Chicago so it is rather easy for them to pretend he is still there.

Word Count: 265


3. Walden
I love his ideas about simplicity and simplifying everything to the lowest possible ratio in order to succeed in life.  But it is a little ironic that he wrote a 15 (or so) page essay to explain that.  His extreme bias towards Germans is interesting.  I wonder how that correlates to his time period- WW2?  He has such a unique perspective on life. These are some questions that this reading provoked from my mind: What if we didn't live like we do now, would we even desire the luxuries we now have?  Why do we concentrate so much on the daily routine of life that we don't get the most out of it?  On page 411 Thoreau says: "We do not ride on the railroad, it rides upon us..."  This is basically saying that we rely so much upon schedules and rapid transit that it begins to take over our lives and be the most important thing to us, which, in his opinion, is wrong.  He brings an important aspect to light in his essay that is something that everyone should keep in mind.  He says: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer," (page  412), so, in other words, you don't always have to keep up with the Jones'.

Word Count: 221


4. Thanatopsis
I'm interested in how a Thanatopsis like this one would be written if the person who was about to die does not love nature.  This would be a comforting poem to read at the time of death to reassure yourself if your after life if you are a firm believer in transcendentalism.  It makes perfect sense how someone starts in nature, so in the end they go back to nature and become a part of it again.  Thus supporting the overall idea of what goes around comes around.  Nature has always nurtured us as human beings so when we die it is only fair to nourish it back when you go 12 feet under (in a literal sense).  I love how he uses an epithet to describe a coffin as a "narrow house".  My take on this story is that when you die, you aren't restrained to a little coffin tomb burial site.  You physically return into nature and mix with natural elements and eventually literally become nature.  In lines 38-47 he lists all the wonderful natural things (meadows, valleys, oceans) that will be the decoration of your "tomb".  This is logical not only as a spiritual belief, but also as a scientific one because after we die our bodies do nourish the soil and mix with it as we decompose.

Word Count: 221


5. Grass
I like the weird morbidity of this poem, it is sickly genius.  I like how Sandburg personifies grass by giving it dialogue that is almost primitive in nature: "Shovel them under and let me work- I am the grass; I cover all."  The author makes it seem like the grass' sole purpose is to cover things, but he does not recognize the many other uses for grass such as beauty, and shelter.  Sandburg suggests that death and war can be covered up and forgotten very easily and that people won't recognize places of mass destruction, after the fact, because they are covered up so well.  This is sadly true.  If we didn't have explicit landmarks showing where things in history happened, would we remember?  Or even care?  The grass could symbolize something more than a natural element, it could recognize corruption in the government also.  There has been cases such as the situation in North Korea where the government tries to cover up what they are actually inflicting upon their civilians by keeping so much of their country a secret and not allowing people in or out.  This poem can also help show what could happen if we don't teach and remember our history- that it will be forgotten, and most likely repeated.

Word Count: 213


Reaction to Essays

• The Sound of Trees, By: Robert Frost
• Walking, By: Henry David Thoreau
• The Force That Drives the Flower, By: Annie Dillard

Its so weird how in Frost’s poem he notices the sound of trees and his poetical mind can think of an entire poem to write about it.  I would never be able to do that.  I’ve never even really noticed the sound of trees, it’s always just been a constant background noise in my daily life when it’s a windy day but I’ve never been partial or impartial to it.  In lines 10-11,”They are that that talks of going but never gets away.”  I think that in Frost’s poem it isn’t the wind that makes the trees sway; I think that it’s their desire to leave but they are never able to because of their roots.  In lines 15-20 Frost says, “My feet tug at the floor and my head sways to my shoulder sometimes when I watch trees sway from the window or the door.  I shall set forth for somewhere, I shall make the reckless choice.”  I think that this makes Frost think about his freedom and then he decide he wants to leave the town depicted in the poem, too.  And his human form comes in handy then because he doesn’t have deep roots locking him in one place.

            In the first paragraph of Thoreau’s essay he says: “It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the Walkers.”  I think this means that not everyone can appreciate nature, and that’s not their fault because walking through nature and becoming a part of it is the calling for some people, and they are the luckiest ones of all.  They are the luckiest because they are the most free.  My favorite line of the entire essay is in the third paragraph: “When a traveller asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered, ‘Here is his library, but his study is out of doors’ …”  This means that because Wordsworth and Thoreau were transcendentalists, they did not care about their lives indoors very much or the study of practical things such as math or literature, but what they really cared about was right in front of their eyes: nature and the outdoors!  In the fourth paragraph he mocks every day people and points out how they are foolish, “Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the most alarming of them all,—I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape …”  Here Thoreau doesn’t mind at all that all these people are disregarding nature and the great outdoors because it leaves more of it for him.  In the last paragraph he warns about the future and how negatively modern ways of life can affect our population as a whole because no one will ever realize the beauty of nature and the species of walkers that he talked about earlier in the poem will become extinct, “At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom……… To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.”

            I love Annie Dillard’s essay.  It is so witty and great.  In the first paragraph she says: “I can like it and call it birth and regeneration, or I can play the devil’s advocate and call it rank fecundity—and say that it’s hell that’s a-poppin’ … ”She seems quite bitter about how quickly things around her are reproducing, I wonder why.  I wonder if possibly it could have been personal problems with her own reproductive health.  She is very biased towards plants and animals.  She loves when plants reproduce and thinks it’s lovely when they grow but she is disgusted by animal reproduction: “Fecundity is an ugly word for an ugly subject. It is ugly, at least, in the eggy animal world. I don’t think it is for plants………. No, in the plant world, and especially among the flowering plants, fecundity is not an assault on human values. Plants are not our competitors; they are our prey and our nesting materials …”  My favorite line of the essay is the last one because it is so brutally honest and 100% true, “After all, water pipes are almost always an excellent source of water. In a town where resourcefulness and beating the system are highly prized, these primitive trees can fight city hall and win.”  Nature can kick butt!  These are all very similar because they talk about the raw power and strength of nature and how it can be restricted at times by others, or can be restricting to others.

Nature Poem
Dive Down
1- White clouds above you
Wade in the promising waters
Hearing what goes up must come down cannot be true
It is always the opposite, this eve, you must go down to come up
5- Dive Down.

I promise you beauties and galore.
Let the current take you down to the reefs
And see the clown fish laugh and pity you.
See the anenome waiting to cling onto its next victim
10- How dark and twisted the great beauty of their tentacles are
Dive Down.

I promise you ease if you just relax and let your lungs fill.
Deeper we go to the great palace of King Tritan and the meremen and women.
So much to explore so little time.  The bottom is near.
15- Hitch a ride on the mighty back of the blue whale
Feel plankton and barnacles on his back.
Dive Down.

Forget your life on shore
You're too deep now to come back up.
20- Darkness sets in and all you can see is eels slithering around you.
In the distance there is a hungry shark looking for prey.
"No."
Panic.
Your hair is standing on end, you can't be noticed by the shark.
25- Dive Down.

The salt burns you can hardly bear it.  "No."
Dive Down.

Your lungs are so tight they're about to burst. "No."
Dive Down.

30- Calm once more, you lose your consciousness and sink.
Brine trickles through your body drop by drop.
It consumes you.
Everything is black.  But this is what you wanted wasn't it?
Dive Down...You'll eventually float up.

Weather Experience
The tension builds, tie down your roofs and batten down the hatches
Howling winds threaten the City off the lake
Everyone rushes home and flips on the radio


People say, "This will be the storm of the century!"
Ecstatic children run outside and make snow angels in the first coating of white fluff in the roads
Reporters warn to stay indoors and off of Lake Shore Drive
Friends come together and get trapped in the same house for two days straight
Enjoying each others company, safe, warm, and out of the snow
CPS has not one- but two snow days for the first time in decades
The next morning a waist deep hike to dunkin' donuts for baked goodies and piping hot cocoa


Shoveling brings the neighborhood together as one
The same goal is trying to be reached by everyone- to clear the sidewalks!
On top of the snow mounds children played
Reality sets in after two days and school opens back up
Mountains of fun was had by all, a blizzard in 2012?  Yes!!!


The Most Beautiful _______
This summer, I went to Seagrove Beach, Florida with my Mom, Dad, and little brother, Ian.  It’s a wonderful little beach town on the Florida pan handle that is famous for its sugar white sand, clear turquoise water, and fabulous sunsets.  We decided to take a vacation there because we grew tired of our ritual Midwestern summer lake house adventures in Indiana.  Also my mom’s friend owns the condo that we stayed in so we got to stay for free!  Plus my mom already knew the area well because she takes a vacation there every spring with her girlfriends.  While we were there, we saw so much amazing wild life, but my favorite part of the trip was the dolphins.  They are also the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.  They literally took my breath away by their natural grace and with the essence of their freedom.  Every day when we were sitting on the porch or beach they would swim by and catapult out of the water, sometimes they were alone and sometimes they were in groups.  They were so close that you could see their fins break the surface and hear the noise they made as they took a breath.  It was mesmerizing to watch and we found ourselves enchanted as we scanned the horizon, always looking for the next performance.

One day, we went out on a fishing boat.  Captain Buddy took us 7 miles off shore into the Gulf of Mexico.  We caught 4 huge king mackerel, but the best part of the day was our dolphin encounter on the way back to the marina.  As we cruised by a cove, we were suddenly surrounded by 30 or more dolphins.  They were so close that you could almost touch them off the back of the boat.  They splashed and played and it seemed like they were happy to share their waters with us.  I was so surprised because I thought that if we were to come that close to dolphins that they would be scared of us, but it was the exact opposite.  Captain Buddy said that it was not unusual to see them in the area, but for me it was the amazing.  I never wanted to leave the dolphin cove even though I was a little green from sea sickness. I promptly forgot all about that and enjoyed the show.

Word Count: 397

Native American Creation Story

How Nail Polish Came To Be

                

In the village of the Turquoise Indians, a competition was brewing.  A woman named Azula had recently begun to gain the attention of all the young eligible bachelors.  She didn’t quite know what to do about it because her past was quite the contrary.  As a child, she had always been bullied because she was born with a rare deformity, her finger tips were blue!  All the kids in her tribe made fun of her and called her a freak for being different.  She had absolutely no friends.  She had always had the attention of people in the village because of her finger tips, but never in this positive light before.   In an attempt to figure out how her finger tips were colored like this, the jealous native girls kidnapped her and brought her to a secluded river bank to interrogate her.  They began to ask her questions, “Azula, what is this on your hands?”  Abetzi asked, “I don’t know, it has always been here, the Gods made me this way.”  “Take it off!” Screamed Ituha.  “I would have given anything to not have this difference because you teased me my whole life for it and I grew to hate myself.  I would give it to you if I could but I can’t,” Replied Azula.  The girls realized that they had been cruel and they felt very bad for what they had said to Azula before.  They apologized to her and she accepted their apology because she realized that she was above them now and had more power than them.  But, because Azula was kind she said, “If its color you want, then let’s use the treasures of the earth to make colors that you can use to make your finger tips as lovely as mine.”

                They went into the woods and scavenged the land for plants, flowers, herbs, spices, and leaves to make their paste.  They spent many hours talking, laughing, and creating vibrant dyes for their finger tips.  They used the earth’s bountiful resources to create a rainbow of these dyes.  Abetzi, Ituha, and the other girls used these to dip their finger tips in.  They made red from rich clay, blue from berries, yellow from dandelions, and green from grass, leaves, and moss.  The combinations were endless and the girls were thrilled.  They all had become friends and attracted many suitors with their pretty painted pinkies. 

Word Count: 405