http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViZBwbzOcC8

What do you wish you/we could have talked about with the women at the jail?

I wish we could have talked about the tension of Bryn Mawr students being able to leave at the end of the day, or the broad topic of power dynamics between us.

I wish I could’ve known why the women wanted copies of Zehr’s book on the children of incarcerated people.  How could they actively choose to step face to face with such a poignant reminder of their failures and losses?

I wish we could have asked – and they could have told me – about the details of their lives.

Also, I wish we could have reflected together on what we learned by making art: What we learned about being creative/having agency within institutional structures; about finding our niches; about working collaboratively.

What did the virtual tour of BMC really make you feel?  I noticed you became very quiet and reserved. – to (a particular woman)

What did you expect from this class prior to starting it? – whole class

I wish I was able to ask about religion and its role in the women’s lives while incarcerated.  I also wish I was brave enough to share experiences I had in common and to admit some of my own faults to make the conversation more equal.  And why didn’t I just ask how they felt about us coming in and how they saw our class, outside of an escape from the monotony of the jail’s daily routine.

hey everyone- this is rather late posting but if anyone has been still lurking around serendip over winter break, here is a link to my soundcloud account, which I uploaded all the recordings I had taken over the semester. There are some you haven't heard, so if you had liked the sound recordings you should check them out!

https://soundcloud.com/saragladwin

Sat down by the cookstove
in a dirt-old house
on a bump on the lip
of a moraine.
Wind, winter, ocean cloistered sandbar.
Shut inside by cold fat sticky rain.

Pondering the knot upon 
               my jawbone.
Sorting stuff I think 
I own. 
Mapping out a fortnight on a train.

A loan, alone, a rolling stone.
Resolve, evolve, remove, escape........remain.
                   Plenilunar overdriven brain.

            “I cannot think of a more authentic form of representation of [something] than its beginnings”. I’m surprised at how abrasive I find my own words, barely written more than a couple months ago at the beginning of my first semester at Bryn Mawr. My old window of perspective, which I now find rather limiting, has expanded to allow me much more room to see the different nuances in my environment, and has therefore helped me reorient myself as a part of it. I used to be enamored with the past, convinced that it could foreground significantly more about an individual or place than the present could. However, after reading works such as Terry Tempest Williams’, An Unspoken Hunger, and J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, I’ve learned that while our history is a necessary reminder of how everything is connected, it sets a very narrow frame for the present. The past does not, and should not, define who we are. While our history is, in a sense, the foundation to the “architecture of the soul”, it does not determine the development of values that we acquire from life experiences.

                I don’t belong here; that was my first thought during our first discussion of Ecological Imaginings. Adopting certain superiority over our ecological curriculum, I found myself to be above our dialogue about our emotions and reactions to nature, and the ecological systems around us. I believed that there was far more knowledge to gain from a class about poverty and culture (Poverty, Affluence, and Culture was my top choice while choosing a writing seminar over the summer) than I would ever glean from a class about how plants feel. However, I was eventually seduced by the engaging authors and ideas from the texts we read throughout the course, and by the end of the semester, was pleasantly surprised by the realization of how much I actually absorbed from the class. At the end of the semester I realized that what I had been learning about ecological relationships was a multipurpose mask; yes, the course molded me into a more informed member of our ecosystem as a whole—but it also tricked me into becoming a stronger writer in the process.

It's no secret that I had a strange semester this fall. It started out mostly normal, and just as I was getting used to my new schedule, everything changed. I missed a ton of class to the point at which I wasn't even really sure how to make up for it in the long run. I ended up spending the rest of my semester mostly alone, fluctuating between having too much work to see friends and not feeling well enough to do my work. I think this class more than my others was affected by that.

I am a usually introverted person, but when removed, as I was this semester, from social interaction for a long time I tend to get quieter and more apprehensive to participate in discussions. Seeing as this class was a mostly discussion-based class, this was not a good semester to have experienced this. The bare minimum that I ended up successfully accomplishing in all of my classes was really, in retrospect, not enough for this class. The sensation of participating in an out of class online discussion while not having too many out of class real discussions of my own was incredibly offputting and I realize I probably should not take a class like this under these conditions again as I had the constant sensation of feeling inadequate in my level of contribution but not feeling like I knew how to contribute at all, so I didn't contribute more. I guess I would like to say that ever posting at all and especially making comments on others' work was a big step outside my comfort zone in itself this semester, and I think that doing so was a good exercise for me.

            For my final project, I want to reflect on a big part of the way I think a lot of us think about the environment (occasionally without admitting it to ourselves). To do this, I have to examine something that we haven't touched on so much in class: fear. One thing I kept coming back to this semester but never really found the time to talk about was the fact that I was having a hard time fully embracing the attitude of "love your environment, go outside and frolic in it" and the occasional "...or you're a bad person" that some of our readings seemed to imply. This is mostly because my journey to familiarize myself with the outside world contained a great deal of fear that I had to overcome, and I don't believe that I could be one of the only ones that experienced this.

(With my extension for my final work, my teach-in participation was at this point a while ago. However I think I still remember it well enough!)

My contribution to the teach-in was to discuss the subject that drove me to take this class in the first place. My journey in connecting with my environment was greatly helped along by working with a marine animal hospital and this peaked my interest in this class as an elective, so I thought I would share something about these experiences with the class as part of the teach-in.

The point of my demonstration was to peak people's interest in further exploring the world around them, but from some of the reactions to my question about which animals they could identify, I feel like I instead made some people feel like they hadn't done enough exploring of their own environment. This was accidental but I feel like it was also a good thing. I liked the fact that people felt like the absence of their ability to identify common animals meant that, generally, they had more exploring to do in order to fully understand the world around them, and I liked that I ended this class in a way that opened further reflection instead of clsed our earlier reflections.

I do recommend the movie (and the book) Life of Pi. Survival/vegetarianism/cannibalism/predator/prey/human animal relations, plus literary devices, allegory, levels of reality, what is real/true-- scary moments but great fun. I went with my niece and nephew (both in their 20s) and thought of all you eco-imaginers...