I've Got Something to Say... But it's all Vanity

Golly was it nice to read David Gessner’s essay “Sick of Nature.” He said so much of what I have been thinking and feeling lately, and he said it in human, conversational language. My patience with lofty, elevated language is running thin. Consider this a warning that a rant is to come. 

                I’m so goddamn sick of this snow. If it doesn’t stop I’m going to destroy something. Like take a bat to it. 

                Annoyance and anger carry me into the graveyard. I’ve felt so stifled lately. My go-to simile is that I feel as if two large hairy hands are gripping my brain and slowly adding pressure. I don’t give a shit about the writing today. I lack the energy to transform visions of the same shit into something supposedly meaningful.

Two deer are near the entrance. I don’t see innocent beauty. I see two dumb animals about a hundred feet from being pummeled by a speeding vehicle. I run toward them, and they trot away. 

Deeper in now, I arrive into my space of openness. I stand still, as I have done. At least the sky is blue and the sun is shining. I like the sun. But I like it because of what it does for me, how it warms my skin. I, like Gessner, am a great narcissist. And my approach to nature writing thus far has only increased my narcissism. When I look at the cemetery, at the snow, I think—how can I relate this to me? What can I learn from this sycamore, these footprints? How does this scene inform the struggles I face?

I hate this mentality. Goddamn does it reduce the world. The world, this graveyard, doesn’t give a shit about the fact that I feel stifled and am anxious about graduating and am barely finding time to work on my novel amidst all my other classwork, even if the novel is the main reason I’m in this program. No, the world just is. The tree says nothing about my frustration. It’s just a tree.

Ken Kesey was a smart dude. He said, “We’re always looking for, never looking at.”

These thoughts in mind, the world opens. The moment shines with clarity, and the snow glitters. My dumb narcissistic thoughts have moved temporarily aside. 

This thinking, this relating, is new to my life. Before my MFA experience, I did not see something amazing and think of what it meant for me. I just saw it. The peaks and waterfalls of Yosemite, the lakes of Glacier, the mountains of Olympic—I just saw them, and goddamn did I marvel at them. When my friends and I passed around a flask in a cave of boulders at Joshua Tree, near a precipice overlooking a grand desert expanse of craggy Seussian trees, I didn’t try to condense it into a distinct quantifiable phase or moment. It just happened, and I loved it. Now, my friends and I look back with admiration, simply because it occurred.

The more I try to relate the nature I see to this particular point in my life, the more I get trapped in my own head.  We can only learn of an experience’s true significance over time. We can never predict all that will result from an event’s transpiring. The more we try to understand it immediately, the more we suffer at the realization we cannot. 

 I want to go back. Back to that time where I wasn’t trying to form everything into something it’s not. Cause that feels like lying, and it hurts my brain to do it. 

I’m not blaming anyone or anything. It’s the way I’ve been approaching writing. Only I can control that. And I’m changing it. Too concerned I’ve become with expectations of teachers and journals and employers and yadee yadda. I have not been listening to the voice inside my head. I’ve been trying to form it into something it’s not. 

The birds are chirping. This sounds nice to me. I’ll leave it at that.