Visual Journal week 6

Visual Journal Week 5 (Holy shit it's week 5 already?!?!?!)

To start off the week, the rope swings are dead...

If you can't quite see them in this picture, the Guilford College administration has once again cut down the rope swings thus ceasing the natural endorphin releases in the brains of many Guilford College students.  While the lament I feel for the loss of these two swings is indescribable through words, I do not solely blame the Guilford College administration for snipping my two favorite ropes in the world.  Instead I also place blame on America for its silly liability lawsuits.  

When I was in Mexico, I would frequently visit a park called Los Colomos.  The park was humongous and in the very center you could pay 60 pesos (roughly $5) to ride a horse for an hour.  Never having ridden a full grown horse to my memory, I eagerly wanted to try so I approached an hombre about it and he gave me one of his horses to ride.  He told me to hop on up (which I struggled mightily in doing) and he asked for 60 pesos and told me to go on my way.  "Well excuse me"I told him, "I have no idea how to ride this thing."  He gave me a brief instruction and said to scram.  There I was riding a horse without a helmet, not having to sign any paperwork, just simply hop on gimme 60 pesos and hasta luego!  

I believe that in simply living your life you have to know that there is a chance that random bad things may happen to you that hurt you or kill you.  If you do something like swing on a rope swing or ride a horse, you have to naturally keep in mind that you are putting your life at risk because there is a small chance that the rope could snap or that bronco might go loco.  Do I need to sign a waiver just to simply walk outside knowing that theres a chance that an asteroid might pummel me in the nogin?  Hell no!  Liability laws not only allow people to unjustly take money from others but take the fun out of simple things.  No wonder we have such a thing like liability in America.  

So basically, as most of my long rants end up, Fuck America, Cause I want my damn rope swings back.  

Visual Journal Week 4

This week in Maia's wonderful class, we got super lucky and Wednesday happened to be the one day that was in the 60's!  We had our class by the big tree as usual and we talked about the speakers.  I conveyed my feelings about them (mostly what I shared in my journal the previous week) and that really got the class into the topic and we all had a good conversation.  Afterwards, the almighty Maia granted us a whole whopping hour to do our Visual Journals.  Good thing I remembered my tripod! I took advantage of this time to wander a different way than I had done so before.  The previous times I had gone south/south west from the big tree.  This time I mixed it up by going North and then North East.  Because the day was so lovely, the moss was really booming so I focused on that for a lot of my pictures.  

Within this one picture, there is an entire Amazon Rainforest.  If you were a small insect or organism, this one picture could capture the entire space in which you travel for your entire life.  There are jungles upon jungles of moss growing around the forest and these Jungles are the homes to many tiny organisms and they only know their little crop of moss.  

Stumbling around some more...OUCH! I ran into a huge briar patch!  Look at the size of that thorn!

I wonder why this plant felt the need to have so many thorns.  Like what does it have that is so precious that it feels the need to do that?  That's all I got about these thorns.  

Once again, this dead tree that I found on the ground was now covered in moss.  I like thinking about what if one of those strands of moss were three times my size?  This thing would be as epic as the grand canyon! Like a jungle grand canyon.  

So after I thinking about how cool moss would be as a tiny organism and getting stuck by some thorns, I stumbled upon one of the most peculiar things I have ever seen in the Guilford woods.  It's shown in the picture below.  I will let you all take a guess about what it is first.  

This a dead cat in mid decomposition.  There were 4 similar cages to this one with cats in different stages of their return to the earth.  Turns out it's an experiment being conducted by the forensic science department at Guilford.  This cat was the one that most still looked like a cat.  Being in the presence of these decomposing cats and considering my undying love for felines, it was hard to stomach.  (not just the smell but the fact that they were dead and they are kitties)  The tag on the top of one of the cages assured that these cats were found dead and then used for the project.  Looking at this picture now and reflecting on this experience, I can't help but think back to two books I have been reading.  One, for this class, (which I actually should have mentioned a long time ago but haven't had the room to include it quite yet) is called the "Spell of the Sensuous" by David Abram.  However, I would like to reference the other book first which is called "the Miracle of Mindfullness" by Thich Nhat Hanh.  In his book he talks about the way we should view death....Well it seems I left that book at home.  I am still gonna leave this here as a reminder because I will put this in here eventually.  BUT, anyhoo, I do have "Spell of the Sensuous"!!!  In Abram's book he philosophizes about perception and other things and of these things he mentions death.  After referring to the way that some tribal cultures view death he explains that "at death the body's decomposition into soil, worms, and dust can only signify the gradual reintegration of one's ancestors and elders into the living landscape, from which all, too, are born." (15) He then talks about the many different forms that peoples bodies, when dead, rejoin the earth and nature.  Of these forms he mentions cremation and burial but also that some tribes dismember the body and leave the parts in certain locations where animals will find them and eventually eat them.  He writes: "Such examples illustrate simply that death, in tribal cultures, initiates a metamorphosis wherein the person's presence does not "vanish" from the sensible world (where would it go?) but rather remains as an animating force within the vastness of the landscape, whether subtly, in the wind, or more visibly, in animal form, or even as the eruptive ever to be appeased, wrath of the volcano. 'Ancestor worship,' in its myriad forms, then, is ultimately another mode of attentiveness to nonhuman nature; it signifies not so much an awe or reverence of human powers, but rather a reverence for those forms that awareness takes when it is not in  human form, when the familiar human embodiment dies and decays to become part of the encompassing cosmos." (16)  Reading all this has made me think about death and nature in a completely different manner, pondering upon this cycle of death and then reintegration back into nature where life then becomes possible for something else.   Hypothetically speaking, when my great great great great great great grandfather died and was buried into the ground, his body decomposed and helped give nutrients to a berry bush.  That berry bush was a really healthy berry bush and it fed 4 bears, 24 squirrels, 9 rabbits, and 24 birds.  After all these animals at my supergreatgrandfathers berry bush, they all had to go poop and so there was a lot of poop because so many animals had eaten those berries.  Therefore, that poop helped 34 oak trees grow, 4 apples trees, 2 more berry bushes, and 45 maple trees.  On top of that, 6 of those rabbits eventually got eaten by coyotes, 19 of those squirrels were food for cats, and one of those bears got shot down by some old ass redneck that was able to feed his family all winter with that bear.  So, without getting even more elaborate, all the energy of every human being that has ever existed on this planet has contributed to the nutrients and growth of many other organisms.  While this stuff all seems kinda obvious, I now realize that life and death are of the same coin: just as I eat and get nutrients from nature, I will soon become the nutrients for some other organism.  Therefore, when we cut down a tree to make into non recyclable paper, burn fossil fuel into CO2, or do any other  irreversible harm to nature, we are killing the last remnants of our ancestors.  Thinking about all this, I now feel honored that one day I will die and my body will be sucked back into the earth (whether through animals eating my body or the decomposition of my body, etc.) to give energy to other living organisms, so that my bodies energy will live through nature forever.  

That's all I want to say about this for now.  

Stumbling around the woods for a while longer, I came across a fallen cedar tree.  Mmmmmm I love the smell of that cedar! I cracked a branch off just so I could take a big ol' whiff!  I love the red shade of the insides.

A good friend of mine and a fellow photographer once said to me that "I am so over taking mediocre pictures of the Guilford woods.  There's just nothing that compelling out there anymore." At the time, I agreed with her, but recently I have been finding the hidden pennies within the woods.  You can stumble through the woods taking pictures of random things, or you can consciously and carefully take each step and examine every little thing around you till you find something that just blows your mind away if you capture it at a certain angle.  I'm glad I have found those pennies again.  

Dis' is da headies!   Purple moss.  

Each week I have been trying to get one shot of at least one of my fellow IDSer's.  This week, I stumbled across Molly Spadone, an art major, who was drawing in her visual journal.  

Facing Molly was a tire swing that I had never seen before in my whole 5 years at Guilford.  She told me that she and the famous Yuri Woodstock had created it.  Though it wasn't that big, it was really cool to see and got me thinking that maybe I will start to pursue tire swings instead of rope swings (since the rope swings recently got cut down...more on that later)

Like I said earlier, there are infinite gems in the Guilford woods.  You just need to know where to look. This is the side of a fallen tree.   

I came across this stream and, while it was already pretty dark, I took this shot with the intention of letting the moving parts of it be blurred (with a long shutter speed) and letting the other still water parts show up clear.

After doing this, I realized what made this scene so beautiful couldn't be captured within a picture because it was the sound effect that added to its majestic-ness.  So I took a video of it.  Towards the beginning and the end you may hear some distracting sounds (of me walking to and from the camera) but the middle should convey some of the serene qualities of this scene.  

Is that a centipede? 

Nope it's just a really cool vine.

As I began to walk back (as I was already running late) I looked up in the sky and noticed one of the most beautiful sunsets I had ever seen.  Not bringing my bike with me this time, I ran my ass off to try and capture the lake and sunset at the same time.  It was pretty hard carrying my back pack and tripod while running full sprint but I managed to do it and was rewarded with these amazing pictures.  

This week I have gone to many talks.  One was on Monday night by a lady whose name I can't remember and I can't seem to find it in any of the emails Maia sent me.  However, she was an artist and a curator for a Bank.  She basically was given a bunch of money to buy art with for the bank (pretty cool job).  I didn't really find much of what she said interesting, however, one thing did stick with me.  She said the first thing we should do right out of college is start a 401K or some other type of account.  After Spending a week with my dear friends Michael and Irene Stoll who I consider successful in every definition of the word, this is also something they stressed to me.  Since I am a mere college student working for AmeriCorps, I don't have any direct income that I can put into a 401K.  However, I did make $100 form my mom doing some financial work this winter break.  While I am now using it as surviving money I am hoping my wonderful Papa will reimburse me for it and start a 401K account for me with the mere $100.  (hint, hint)

I've ran out of steam this week despite the fact that I still have much more to say.  Below are my photoshop pictures of the week.  Hope you enjoy them!