Earlier this semester, I had posted a short paragraph on "What boundaries?" in my Thoreauvian walk while comparing the implications of a wall separating the campus from "the rest of the world." Essentially, I came to the conclusion that these physical, "man-made" boundaries do little to separate "bryn mawr" from the rest of the world. Our world is not entirely physical - it is also energetic, interconnected, cyclic, and continually transforming. This idea of separation of physical, "man-made" boundaries in relation to the Earth is further expanded upon by both Waring and Laduke in their respective writings.

Waring writes in Counting for Nothing, "One of the things that nature could demonstrate was that it didn't know anything about nation-state boundaries...When the ocean was demarcated into 200-mile economic zones and fishing quotas, did cod carry passports to indicate that they belonged to North America or Scandinavia?"

Indeed man-made nation-state boundaries come in very handy during times of war, economic interaction, and for statistics of measurement (i.e. GDP, child mortality, HIV infliction rate, life expectancy - see www.gapminder.org) requiring distinct separation of pieces of land into their relative nations and governments. However, they do not come in handy during times in which a different worldview is absolutely required - such as during honest acknowledgement of the environmental circumstance at hand.   

The weather has been better these days and temperature rose somehow. The sun warms the world--the site I picked looked just the same as the first time I saw it. Grass was still green and the bench stood there, quietly, as if it had not experienced any wind, storm, or snow.

The Hurricane came and went away, leaving mess behind. It damaged trees, wires, houses, and hurt animals and people. However, it could never bring away the sunshine. When another day comes, everything natural grow back to normal, as if nothing big has ever happened.

For us, the hurricane is a disaster, but for nature, it is just a trivial event that brings nothing and takes nothing away.

Today I was thinking that Bryn Mawr is really a garden.  The nature around us is not really wild, but placed in certain ways to make it appealing to people walking on it.  It is a very natural garden, certainly.  It reminds me of the English gardens around the time Versailles was built.  Because Versailles was such a big feat all to make Louis XIV look powerful, the English responded to it by saying that their king did not need such a grand waste of money to prove himself to his people.  The English particularly seemed to despise the sculped, geometrical gardens as seen in Versailles.  So, they made their gardens extremely natural.  They were not wild, but designed to look wild.  I guess Bryn Mawr is not this designed wildness of the English, nor the unnatural sculpture of French gardens.  It is a happy medium.

In silence class this past week, my group seemed to be lured by the passage in Mazine H. Kingston's reading which read: "I remember telling the Hawaiian teacher, 'we Chinese can't sing 'land where our fathers died.' She argued with me about politics, while I meant because of curses. But how can I have that memory when I couldn't talk? My mother says that we, like ghosts, have no memories" (194). We discussed the possible meanings of ghosts and what they symbolize in terms of Kingston's personal silence as a female child of Chinese heritage. Our conversation reminded of a concept we read in Reading is my Window, that Sweeney described as silences in the home. Kingston was constantly being silenced or told to be silent by her mother. What continues to perplex me the most about the passage, however,is the disconnect and the silence that emerged thereof between the teacher and the student's understanding of Kingston's reluctance to sing "My Country, 'Tis of Thee". I think that it is in this interaction that another meaning of ghost is highlighted, for it is in the ghost like space, that is, the silent and dark space between cultures, where silence occurs. What's more, the lack of cultural understanding and the inability of Kingston to speak prevents that understanding from coming to light. How do we reconcile silence in the home and silence in the outside world?

The sun is casting its last hour of glory on the roof of Rockefeller and Goodhart. The warmth of sunshine is back this weekend. So am I back on the lawn behind carpenter. The benches we- Ecological Imagining group - sat on shivering on Tuesday was still somewhat in a circle. Yet the conversation is gone. The air is quite without the think-aloud reading of Kincaid’s “Alien Soil.” I could hear rustles from far away, is it the wind in the trees? Or is it the water on the rock beds?

What am I doing on the bench? Reflecting. Am I productive in the value system where only what can be counted counts? Definitely not. I am spending an hour, $12.5 tuition (calculated by my friend) writing a short passage. Yet the conversation we had takes time to digest, reflect, and ruminate – one of the intangible thing I am doing simultaneously. And the intangible appreciation for nature and cosmology view of the universe Bryn Mawr college is teaching me every minute of the day can not easily prized with a number.

When I saw that we were reading Wendy Brown, after we had read some of her quotes in Sweeney’s book, I was prepared to feel negatively about her.  I’m not sure if I understood correctly, but when reading “Reading is my Window” I understood that Sweeney was often arguing against Brown’s words and I often find myself taking the authors side.  So it was interesting to begin reading Brown feeling like I was going to question everything she said (when normally I tend to go along with the authors words), and this was more complicated by the fact that I had to read slowly to understand.  I tried to read critical, and even though I thought I would be against a lot of what she wrote, what I understood mostly made sense to me, but was also complicated by the fact that a lot of it seemed paradoxical.  Examples of some paradoxes I stumbled across were:

This week in my spot was beautiful. Instead of being a kind of quiet, unprovoking beauty, the view from where I sat, and the act of taking this photograph of it, prompted many questions. I realized that what I was doing was an act of artistic expression, and that even the very things I saw within frame of my lense were not entirely nature, but some past human artistic expression as well. I thought:

What does artistic expression have to do with ecology? Where does 'art' fit into the natural ecosystem? What value does it have regarding the health of all things on the planet?

I really enjoyed reading Wendy Brown's essay on Freedom Silences, especially because that it's a text that can be used as a frame to read other texts, events and experiences. I also think that a big part of why I enjoyed he text so much is because I did the kind of close reading that we did in Anne's class last week. I was particularly by the way in which breaks down the traditional ways in which we think of silence and oppression as standing in contradiction with freedom and voice. This helped me recall my experience abroad last semester in which I equated having power and feeling "free" or valued with "schooling", as I called it, people's statements that posed immigrants, people of color, Muslims, the poor as inferior. In my mind, this "voice" was freeing and I needed to speak out and get angry every time I encountered such statements. Soon enough, however, it became exhausting and I no longer felt free. It's as if all of a sudden I was back in jail that I had created for myself in feeling the need to fight every battle, get upset, and then realize that the person's point of view had not changed.

The cozy corner of the moonbench is its own little haven within itself. Anyone is welcome to sit there and enjoy what it has to offer. The upward view of senior row makes the path toward the moon bench a subtle, natural focal point of beauty. At the same time the moon bench lays empty often. The tradition goes if you kiss your significant other while sitting on the bench you will break up. This does not attract many couples. Plus the bench is also cold an hard like most man-made structures while the bushes bend around it to soften its features and the trees create a cocoon. The simplicity of the moon bench allows it to just sit and be its self. To have a timeless face and never change. Unlike the people and naute around it.