December 19, 2014 - 08:36
Nathália Santos
Jody Cohen
ESEM Changing Our Story: Shifting Identities, Altering Environments
11/09/2014
Hammocks Swing
After Mrs. Crawford’s lecture, I decided to come back to my Exploration place and try to see it through both my eyes and hers. The Hammocks make me feel relaxed and are the place where I do most of my thinking. As I walked back to there I decided to think on what brought me such a feeling of relaxation if compared to the other places in the Campus and I came across three factors: the movement, the trees and the ground I was stepping on.
As a former-prospective-Physicist, I decided to analyze the movement of the Hammocks. As you sit down, there is an alteration on the mass of the hammock, what makes it move like a pendulum. If we were in the vacuum, such movement would keep happening forever. However, despite the disturbance I provoked on the Hammocks, the friction would sooner or later stop the movement. In order to keep moving, I would have to push myself. In order to obtain the relaxing swing from the Hammock I would have to start it. That just showed me that part of the reason why I feel relaxed relies on me. On a voluntary decision to start a movement. The same kind of decision I took when I stepped on the plane to come to Bryn Mawr.
Some people could describe my evolution during my time here as a butterfly getting ready on its cocoon. But as Andrea Friedman brilliantly portrayed on her poem: “I'd say metamorphism, not metamorphosis / is the better story” (Meta/phor 6-7). I voluntarily buried myself under a new culture, language and country under the purpose of becoming someone better. I’ve been accumulating knowledge from both the classes and people I’ve met during this time. I’ve been heated up by overwhelming and unexpected kinds of personal problems, I’ve been under the pressure of weekly essays and projects, daily deadlines, family expectations. “[N]o mere cosmetic change, no, but a shift down to its very chemistry” (Meta/phor 24-25).
Rock. I’m on my way to become one. As I sit on the Hammocks and stare at the trees on the background. Different heights and amounts of leaves in each tree. Some have brown leaves, red, orange and even some leafless. That gives me the impression that sometimes you have to let go something that seems to be essential in your life, gradually, to make it through a harsh time. Like the leaves that helps the trees to photosynthesize their food. It also makes me wonder what the trees have seen happening throughout their hundred years of existence in Bryn Mawr. The conversations and plans made between the two trees that hold the hammocks. The plans made under any Bryn Mawr tree.
Reading the tree guide you find out the different species of trees in Bryn Mawr. All from different locations, living in perfect harmony to create the Bryn Mawr environment. Contact zones. Like the different nationalities of people walking around the campus every day. Colorful leaves on the ground like the different languages spoken daily. The trees are my relaxation because of the Contact Zones. That’s the definition of my country, a cultural mix. The clash between different cultures.
Mountains. The clash between two Tectonic Plates. The geological version of a contact zone. Hills are eroded mountains. Mrs. Crawford’s lecture in its core did not add much to my Earth knowledge. But it helped to revive memories of lectures of my old elementary school. What caught my attention when I first got into campus was the amount of hills. Rio is pretty much flat, Bryn Mawr is a roller coaster. And the funny thing, at least for me, is that this roller coaster is not just geological, but psychological too. Ups and downs. Grades, friends, humor and life itself. In order to climb a hill, you just have to keep walking, life goes on. That’s what keeps me resilient on Bryn Mawr and that’s why the ground I step on relaxes me. It shows me that life goes on, no matter what, and starting on Pembroke I will have hills on my way to the Senior Steps, but I can surpass than if I am strong enough to keep walking.
I grab a stone, by what I learned from the class, it is a limestone. It all started from a particle. The same particle that if deposited somewhere else could have become a mountain or even if in the same place, with a little more pressure could have become slate or schist.
And when you hold it in your hand,
and if you know how to read a rock,
then what you'll see is this: What it was. Where it's been. What fires
it's seen (Meta/phor 36-39)
May I become Granite after I graduate: Consistent and everlasting.
.
Works Cited
Friedman, Andrea “Meta/phor” 01 April, 2002. Web. 7 Nov 2014.