Stress clung in my mind, but I stayed waiting and hopeful under the canopy of leaves.

Wanting the tension to blow away with the breeze that blew by me.

Wind pulled at my hair and took with it as it left the anxious energy that had been sitting in my head all day and stifling my thoughts.

My mind was free again and I was blissful.

Funnily enough, sometimes animals live in nature. There are squirrels in the tree that I'm observing in, and we have some unresolved issues.

This morning at the English House I was drawn to the perimeter -- where the grass meets the woods, and the building. And I found today that what stood out to me were objects and bodies in motion. This was because mostly everything was still (except with the aid of this wind). So when something moved on it's own it caught my eye.

I encountered two eye catching events of movement.
First was the floating spinning leaf.

Spinning occured around, and around, and again. 

The second was a lot of bees. 

The bees surrounded the entire tree. 

Working up and down. Gathering and back again.

While I was walking around the perimeter of the backyard of the English house I was tempted to go into the woods. But I reminded myself that my place was in the backyard of the English house and not in the woods. I felt slightly stuck.

Cannot move out. 

ORIGINAL:

SIGHTS

Yellow little sunflowers

Sparkling rocks

Sunlight blanketing treetops and bushes

Dead leaves

Falling leaves

Students in hats, carrying books

Hazy sky

SMELLS

Grass

Roses

TOUCH

Wind on face and in hair

Grass in my fingers

Chills (shoulders, spine)

Rheomode Site Sit - 1

SIGHTS

Yellow sunflowers existing beside sparkling rocks bathing in sunlight overwhelming treetops, bushes, and all that is. Leaves dying, falling, re-falling, touching students in hats carrying onwards under a sky filled with clouds connected to clouds connected to jetfuel residue.

SMELLS

Olfactory analysis confirms particles flying, re-flying in the air of the garden, entering cells within nasal passageway and brain percepting rose, grass.

TOUCH

Air moving through pressure effect(ings) carrying colder air particles colliding with skin. Colliding and re-colliding with skin cells to create vibrations vibrating down spinal cord.

In Fun Home, Alison's father loves lilac, and it wasn't an unexpected choice. With its pale color and delicate shape, lilacs have been fascinating poets for ages. Originated from Greek Mythology, lilac has been a symbol for love and innocence. Nevertheless, in ancient Chinese poems, poets have often denote their sadness by lilac. Lilac is a flower of beautiful things, but it is so delicate that it could be damaged by slight tearing.

On the site I chose to sit, there weren't lilacs. Most flowers have bright pink or red color, and they could easily be spotted even in cloudy days. They look bright, energetic and exceptional on the endless green field. Their existence could encourage people to move on in their lives.

There is one thing that is same between the campus site I chose and the Fun House--both place have scattered plants that do not make people feel crowded. The plants are there, because they are supposed to be there. The plannings of both places are natural and undecorative.

Read the photos from top to bottom, or from bottom to top. I meant the one on the bottom to be the first, but I do not know how to control where they are inserted, and the Serendip fairy put each one above the one before. So, ok.

Nor do I know how to write in between or below-- so here is the story. Maybe it is a puzzle for you, to match each caption to the right picture.

Back in the "real" world.

Still ghostly.

The house my mother grew up in: 210 Roberts Road. Ghostly-- the camera decided to make it ghostly. Camera gremlin, or something I touched by "mistake".

View back toward campus from Cambrian Row. With poppies. (They are not poppies, but they look like poppies in the picture.)

Roots.

Three ladies = one beech tree.

Labyrinth from below.

Labyrinth map, from memory.

No, I must admit, the labyrinth does not have the magical feel I was expecting from it. But maybe I have not found its spirit. Maybe this picturing is part of penetrating. Walking to the center does not equal discovering the mystery.

Go deeper. Where one enters, it's the third circle. That was the key to drawing the map.

The circus music flowed from Thomas, yet I am reluctant to join the mass.

The sun embraced me with warmth, yet I am bleak skin beneath.

The grass under my feet was similar, yet unfamiliar.

The moon last night was bright, yet was not right.

The squirrels were leaping back and forth home.

I am sitting on a bench, gazing the blue blue sky. 

In her graphs, Bechdel didn't hightlight the animals and their motions. But I think animals and their ANIMATION are important part of the ecosystem and should be noted.

Reading Fun Home made me very very homesick.

Somewhat Like Alison, I also have a "sissy" dad. He has a driver's license but he never drives, because he doesn't trust his own driving skills. He locks and checks the door and windows before the family goes to bed, because he is afraid of burglary. He only goes to work 3 days a week and work at home other days, because he fears getting into a traffic accident while commuting. I never liked staying at home, for my father always sits on the dinner table and reads all the news involving accidental death to me.

My dad is "death-phobic". Yet, I still adore him and miss his companion.

Original Paragraph from my Thoreauvian web paper: (Already written in the Maoof style of “telling a story and putting yourself in it”)

To find the boundaries of the campus I walked around it in a circle starting and ending in the same spot. I didn’t begin to ruminate on the subject of circles, however, until I reached “The Labyrinth,” which is what I would consider the center of the campus. I have always felt that there is a definite power in circular shapes. Traditionally, circles have been used to symbolize everything from wholeness and completion to life, eternity, and even the void. Circles occur naturally- you only need to look at an orb web or the ripple a rock makes when thrown into a pond to confirm this. But to me they have the spiritual meaning of the beauty of imperfection, the fact that we often “walk around in circles” in our lives, and the fact that all of us will, ultimately, circle around to death.

    I wanted to return briefly to the question I asked in class on Thursday about what I Rigoberta Menchu, and the trauma novel, does. I asked this question because I have read Trauma fiction before. Most recently, I read Half of a Yellow Sun, a Nigerian novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The novel explores a horrendous civil war which took place in Nigeria in the 1960s – essentially a genocide which was funded by European and unrecognized by Americans. It was difficult but incredibly moving to read, and for me, it succeeded in establishing empathy and producing shock and disgust that I had never heard any mention of this history (especially considering that it wasn’t that long ago).

Original: