A ten-minute walk away from my house takes me to a nameless body of water I’ve come to be fond of. I have a deeply ingrained tendency to count distance and understand space with minutes – how long does it take to walk to school, how many minutes by car to get to the nearest Walmart. Meters and miles are all too abstract, and what I (problematically) take to be a universal interaction with the land/water/air concretizes what objective measures have rendered strangely inaccessible. In the tiniest, the simplest, the weirdest ways, I seem to have centered my physical existence in spaces, even if I know they are gracefully apathetic to my presence.
Upon arrival, tall trees and tiny bushes, blue sky, blue water, and all the biota living in, and surrounding, the pond make me feel welcomed – arguably because that’s precisely the feeling I come seeking. The trees move with the wind, the water is eternally dynamic in its contained stasis, the sun hits us all the same. At random times, I’ve sought tranquility and chaos in these waters for the past five years. But this week I’ve visited this spot devoutly. No longer to journal and get lost in my own thoughts; no longer to render the majesty of this ecosystem a macrocosm of my internal state. I have visited to notice how many birds I can’t name, how many branches in the water I’ll take to be gators, how the softness of the sand changes as I walk around. I’ve come every afternoon to make sense of a rather incomprehensible realization: how have I been navigating this space while being so unfamiliar with it?
I’m dancing with that question in my head, thinking about the processes I could witness, the understandings I could deepen… by allowing myself to explore a space in my absence. Like listening to a conversation that I can’t quite engage with fully, I want to get back to the basics. To engage with nature beyond the ways that now feel natural. I’m hoping to explore this same spot through different lenses every day next week, to wait for something else to be revealed, to wait for another part of me to be challenged.
It’s amazing to realize how a place that you go to so often can also be so unfamiliar. I feel like the relationships we carve with places and even people can seem so fixed that we may not realize how much more there is to know and experience. I’m excited for you to re-define your relationship to this nameless pond and see it and experience it through different lenses.
Could you say more as to why your/the objective measures are problematic? I find your last two sentences in your first paragraph really interesting, but I’m not sure if I fully grasp what you are articulating. Are you sure they are apathetic to your presence? Aren’t you a part of nature too? Regardless, I like your goal for the next week.