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.
Hi Deanna!
From the beautiful photo seen in class, I wanted to be able to read your blog to really be able to capture the thoughts and feelings that come with the photo you have used. Reading your blog, especially the first paragraph I could feel how special this location is for you. Because you have said you have lived there your whole life, its private, and it’s stunning, I can only imagine how much this place must hold near and dear to your heart. Reading your post also made me feel as if I was reading about Barbra Kingsolver’s cabin in the woods. For her, that was her little bit of paradise and allowed her to escape the city. She treasured it and it held her roots and she was able to bring her children for them to treasure it and maybe grow some roots for them too. For you it sounds like it is your place of peace. I wanted to mention a little about the Williams reading because I felt a point you made towards the end of your blog really fell hand in hand with what Williams described towards the end of her story Red. Williams mentions a ”bedrock of democracy.” What I interpreted from this viewpoint is that people in a community can come together and preserve their roots and the environment that contains their roots. I wanted to ask if you imagine the road you live and those having access to this beautiful body of water near your home are part of a bedrock of democracy? I would imagine you all work hard to keep that area beautiful. I also wanted to mention that perhaps UMass Dartmouth could be considered a bedrock of democracy? We have those trails for nature cleansing as you mentioned, as well as to bring nature to a concrete campus. Students and professors hold clubs on campus to keep those areas beautiful and clean and preserve as much nature as we can on this campus. I think you did an amazing job with your blog! Thank you for allowing me to read it!
Hey Deanna
I love the image you chose it is extremely beautiful and I can definitely see why you love Devol Pond. Personally growing up my sister and I would go on walks all the time around a small pond within our neighborhood (Acushnet) and I have to agree with this idea of ‘Nature cleansing.’ Within the reading “Touching the Earth” Bell Hooks describes how important nature is not only for our psyche, “without the space to grow food, to commune with nature, or to mediate the starkness of poverty with the splendor of nature, black people experienced profound depression. Working in conditions where the body was regarded solely as a tool… a profound estrangement occurred between mind and body” (Hooks 366). While Hooks is specifically talking about the African American experience I believe it is still applicable to all of us, seeing as nature has this grounding ability. For instance, Williams states within his excerpt from “Home Work” as the world becomes “more crowded and corroded by consumption and capitalism” humans will need minimalistic landscapes like the redrock canyons in southern Utah in order to remind ourselves “how essential wild country is to our psychology” (Williams 6). Personally, I wonder what about nature allows us to feel that sense of peace and comfort? Is it just our ancestral roots calling out to us? Or our we just genetically wired to feel a sense of personal power and well-being associated with working in being one with the land? Whatever the reason I think that city dwellers are definitely capable of understand and experience a connection to nature even in the most simplest ways like a cleansing.
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