Hi everyone, welcome back!

(Tip: Click on the photo to enlarge it if you want to see it more clearly, it looks blurry if you don’t!)

This week, I wanted to talk about where I grew up: Westport, Massachusetts. The photo above is a photo I took this past summer of a little pond called Devol Pond located at the end of my private street here in Westport. This is a place I have been visiting ever since I was a little girl, and it is a place I sometimes go to when I need clarity and just some simple peace and quiet. This little hidden gem is private property, so only the people who live around the perimeter of the pond and the people on my street can visit it, making it that more special. To get to it, you have to walk down a little pathway filled with trees and bushes, but once you get through that, the land opens up to a small beachfront with a picnic table. My neighbors often bring their boats down to the pond in the summer to go fishing and enjoy the ponds’ calming waters. It is also the place that sparked my desire to get involved with photography, and many photos I have taken of this pond have won photography and art awards over the years. Most of the photos I take are of ponds, lakes, oceans, and nature. I would include more of my photography but unfortunately, I lost everything on my phone recently. Nonetheless, I have taken hundreds of photos of this pond over the years, and feel like I will never get sick of its beauty.

Although this pond of mine is not a mountainous area where you can see trees and wildlife for miles, it functions as my quiet place to unwind in the wildness. I read an article by Barbra Kingsolver about her cabin in the woods of Walker Mountain where she lives during the summer months with her family, and they love every minute of it. She mentions that they go to the cabin for those few months as their summer vacation to get away from the busy city life, and she does most of her creative writing while at the cabin. She even had an encounter with a bobcat! Kingsolver mentions that “People need wild places. Whether or not we think we do, we do. We need to be able to taste grace and know once again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and glaciers” which I could not agree with more. Every person needs time with nature once and a while, whether they think they do or not. “Nature cleansing” is a technique some folks use when they are over-stressed with their everyday lives, so they go out into the wilderness for an hour or more with no outside distractions and just breathe. Many people do not know, but UMASSD has a few pathways where the old windmill resides, and during the warmer months of the school year, groups of people to go walk down there and spend hours using the nature cleansing technique before finals. I have done this once before and let me tell you, it really works. Although we may all feel like we do not have time for such things, or that it is too dangerous to go alone, but the simple fact is: humans need this type of interaction and it as huge benefits. Being out in the wilderness can lower blood pressure, relieve migraines, and help with focusing issues. It sure helped me.