View of Lake Delavan

House that looks similar to my old one

Delavan Lake Yacht Club where I attended camp

When I was first born my family bought a house up in Wisconsin along Lake Delavan. My family and I would drive the two hours from Chicago to Delavan and drive down narrow dirt roads until we finally reached the home. The house was considered to be located on the Island of Lake Delavan. The house was located in a somewhat secluded area with only 2 houses located in the block of land. Even though there weren’t many people around for me to play with I still enjoyed exploring the areas around my house and I still had my neighbors. My sister and I would visit our neighbors often because the family had a son who was roughly my age. We would either play in the house or go outside and explore.

            To begin, a quote from the ecology of imagination in childhood by Edith Cobb: “The child’s ecological sense of continuity with nature is not what is generally known as mystical.  It is, I believe, basically aesthetic and infused with joy in the power to know and to be.  These equal, for the child, a sense of the power to make...”

 It is strange to realize that in my first essay for a course on Eco-literacy, an essay on home and belonging, I never once entertained the idea of the environment, or the ‘outdoors’, as home. I unearthed one of my homes, “the body as home”. However, the body as home is not just one home, but many different factors coming together to form a whole. Your body encompasses your physical being, your consciousness, your emotions, your memory, where you have been and where you are going. I suppose that nature is in intrinsic part of the whole of ones body, and how perhaps the body is not the only home. For there two things that are always with me: my body, and the environment.

Sunnyside, Houston, TX

When I was four, I started school and had to go to the afternoon session of Pre Kindergarten. Rather than spending my mornings watching PBS kids, I’d walk around my neighborhood with my grandma and our two-seat stroller looking into people’s trash bags, searching for aluminum cans. We’d carry big black trash bags in the stroller making it easier for us to walk around and keep piling on the cans inside the trash bags. If we had a good day, we’d fill two trash bags and come home to a rinse with the water hose and climb back into bed as we both watched the telenovela and had pan dulce with cola-cola for breakfast.

I started to explore my community and get to know the people around us by picking at people’s trash. I didn’t think there was anything bad with it. No one would point or stare. If anything, our friends around the neighborhood would already have separated the aluminum cans from the rest of the trash and saved us the time and effort. My grandmother wasn’t an American Citizen or Resident at the time, but she had to make money some way or another because my grandfather and her couldn’t support a house full of seven men and three daughters, plus a new granddaughter. 

I wished with all my heart that I could pee in the woods. Honestly, that was the only thing that ever made me feel jealous of boys when I was growing up, that they could pee in the woods easily while I could not, at least not as comfortably. I was proud of my girlhood from a young age, preferring feminine clothing (as in that made for female-bodied people), joining Girl Scouts, riding a bike without the bar from seat to handles, etc, but out in nature, camping and on long hikes and places generally free from the normal facilities and peeing in the woods was sometimes the only option, I wished I could be a boy, even if only for five minutes.

After an excruciating 13 hour flight from Seoul to New York, I waited in line to get through immigration. I was pulled away from the line by an officer after peering into my passport and led into a plain room. On our way there, the officer jokingly commented on how there were “so many of you Lee’s and Park’s” (which is partially true - Korea's most common last names are Lee, Jeong, Kim and Park but each of these last names have a very unique Chinese root and can be distinguished by region, class, and clan) and I nervously laughed and agreed, unknowingly giving into a micro-aggressive comment and leading him to think that statments like that would not offend anyone. The room was filled other international students like me and there were families with young children who were anxious to start their vacation. I was not in any trouble and the immigration office just merely wanted to make sure and interview us that we were indeed college students. The process took a long time and I sat in the room staring at the blank walls and listening to the conversation amongst the officers. However, an instance that stuck out to me was when an officer read someone’s documents and started laughing and passed it around with his coworkers. The officers were laughing at a name because it sounded funny but what struck me the most was that they did not care that we were in front of them and could hear and understand every word.

When's it my turn?
Wouldn't I love, love to explore that world up above?
Out of the sea,
Wish I could be,
Part of that world

--The Little Mermaid

 I’d sing along, my young self draped over the coffee table in front of the TV with a huge smile on my face, I was a mermaid. I even asked the shopping mall Santa to make me into a mermaid that year, my heart filled with mild disappointment when I awoke to a Little Mermaid toy doll under the tree instead of real life fins on my feet. I didn’t recognize until recently the irony in this wish, how I so badly wanted to become a mermaid and escape to the sea while I sang along to a tale about leaving the ocean to become human. Ironic, even, that this mermaid became human in order to commit to a lover, while I wanted to become a mermaid to find freedom and independence.

Yet, my mom sometimes recounts a story of a very young Simona experiencing the ocean for the first time. I put my hand into the sand, looked at the grains stuck to my skin, stared at the waves, turned my eyes to my mom’s face, and began to cry. Sand was a foreign substance, and the ocean was as threatening as the unexplored depths it guards. This fear of the sea as a young child compared to my love for the underwater world found in films is a confusing contradiction. What impacted me more, the fantasy or the reality?

http://www.viralnova.com/beach-art/

This is really cool and it reminded me of Ava's art in it's impermanence and its connection to natural mediums/forms.