I walked along the Labyrinth and enjoyed the mild, delightful sunny day. The yellow leaves glowed in the sun. What a serene Sunday morning! Students walked around the campus; field hockey players were in a game; squirrels happily enjoyed the breakfast. The Bryn Mawr bubble created such a peaceful environment for each community member to thrive happily. The Labyrinth did have a complicated structure. The end looked so near at one point, but after I took a turn, the route led me to an outermost ring. Turn around and around, the sense of back and forth, close and far repeated again and again. I felt I was almost there, however, this was an illusion. Because the route I saw was not the route I walked on.

It’s a beautiful day today. The sun is warm and the sky is clear. I am very happy to be outside.

The trees behind the English house don’t discriminate among themselves by class, gender, race or sex (or if they do I can’t tell). The trees probably have some sense of sex difference among themselves, but I’m not sure if they have any sense of the meaning of class gender or race. These words probably don't mean much to the trees (most likely for the better). But the English House itself signifies wealth and higher class. Mostly because of what goes on inside of it -- students learning and professors teaching and working. College in this country is not something that is limited to people of a higher class, but is a place that is harder for people of a lower class to get to. This means that the people around the backyard of the English house would usually be a part of the upper middle class. It isn’t the trees themselves that make race gender and class significant, it’s this people who surround the trees, and the perceptions of those people.

Just came back from my old spot on a warm winter Sunday morning. It was good to see the sun again on the blue clear sky. In my mind I always associate sunshine with happiness and joy, I associate the shreds of sunshine on a row of trees with liveliness. But there is no such association today. Sunshine brightens up the space but cannot take away the sad shades of autumn on the falling leaves. Somehow, it makes me think of the end of the beginning. People say spring is time for a new beginning, when plants come to life after winter doldrums and grow and thrive in the summer. Then comes autumn when they begin the shred their leaves just to wait for long winter to go and the spring to come back to life. I cannot help feeling the sentimental.

And then I thought, if I were to draw a picture of this picturesque place, I would have a hard time trying to sketch out the patterns. There is actually hardly any pattern since nature is about randomness. Among the trees that are still green there are those that have turned yellow or those that have no more leaves, randomly. Among the trees that are so tall and big there are those much shorter or larger, randomly. Merely looking at this place I would say there is not class division here in nature. Unlike human society, I cannot point out which plant is of higher authority or which is oppressed. It does not seem like a bad thing to nature, because they all grow and thrive and will die some day…

Last night, my site was different than usual. For one, I visited the site at night. The tree I sit under has also lost a lot of leaves. When I was wondering around last night, trying to find my usual branch, I was scared out of my wits. The tree looked incredibly different--I wasn't sure if I was looking in the right tree. And I couldn't see any squirrels (which is not a good thing, because they have become very fond of sneaking up on me). So, despite not being very religious? I said the Hail Mary out loud over and over again. But, after I'd found the spot andfoully checked out the tree with my flashlight for squirrels, I managed to settle down a lot. The only noise I could hear was from humans. I could hear myself, and also a lot of noise from Radnor and a few people walking by the tree. The piece of "nature" I go to every weekend is really not in nature. Now that the leaves aregoing, it no longer even looks like that might bepossible. It's very touches by the well-to-do "nature" of the college. It's even touched by religion.

Thanks to Blair Howell for the following. I thought it might interest you.

While searching for articles, I stumbled across a lovely gem: Therapy Today (2005) "Wild at Heart: Another Side of Ecopsychology". Unfortunately it does not list an author, nor could I find a list of collaborators.

Today I was struck by the way the colors could almost be spring rather than fall. We're just at the precise indeterminate balance point... The few remaining greens are thin and sparse, and even the reds and russets have faded to a shade that could be the color of new leaves budding instead of old ones falling. The light, too, in the late afternoon-- a gentler, warmish day today-- could have been a blush of spring. It made me think about my mother. Something about cycles, and an equivalence between the seasons and the ages of (wo)man, so that old age is like the autumn drawing into winter, and just as fall can be mistaken for spring, so too old age has its kinship with childhood. My mother loves her wind-up bunny rabbit that can hop hop hop on the breakfast table: it can keep her entertained for a surprisingly long time. She's 87. And today at lunch, as we were talking about the birds at the bird feeder, species we've never seen before here (a red-bellied woodpecker!) and whether it's to do with climate change that they come further north now, and whether it's a bad thing because we have interfered with nature, and Mother says, "Well, humans are part of nature too. We are part of nature, and, we watch it." A kind of wisdom I would never have expected from her. Well, I didn't realize till I was almost middle-aged that my mother is someone who always kept track of the phases of the moon. "Oh yes, I'm a moon-watcher," she said. Does your mother watch the moon?

I decided to try something different today and went to my site at 9 pm instead of 9 am. It was cold and it was dark. (Thank you time change, although it would have been dark at 9 pm, regardless.) I had some reservations about going outside when it was so dark out, but these were tempered by the fact that lamps light our entire campus when the sun goes down. This got me thinking. Why are humans so obsessed with light? I guess that there are the obvious reasons- the sun is our greatest source of light and without it we would have no warmth, no air, and no food. Plants provide us with the latter two things and they could not grow without light. But I think another reason that we are afraid of the dark is because darkness represents the unknown and we are very uncomfortable with the unknown.

This thought process brought me to a show that I remember from years ago called, Are you Afraid of the Dark. The show, as its name suggest, takes place at night, and in the woods. This just got me thinking about how much fear our society still harbors for both nature and the dark. For some reason, setting a scary show outside only adds to its fear factor.