Nature Talks

For my nature walk, I decided that I could go examine the different plants that grew on campus. I find it amusing that the 'nature' I went to look at was not actually natural at all. The plants that I looked at as I explored campus were all planted at some time. When I go on my walks, I enjoy the absence of human interactions. I decided to go for my walk on Saturday morning at about 2 a.m.

I wandered around the campus as I searched for symbols of nature. I chose to walk at night because I love going out into darkness and examining what the world looks like in low levels of lighting. Nature, no longer expressed by the colors we see in light, is constrained to a spectrum of black and white. These photos I took of trees near the quad show color because I would not have been able to take a picture of the nature I viewed in black and white because the camera cannot detect images in that low of a level of lighting. I enjoy viewing the world in a colorless fashion because it forces one to use shadows and shapes to analyze what is being viewed. In the daytime, the trees and other plants just blend in with the scenery.

Many people fear the night and the shadows the small amount of lighting does create. My favorite game growing up was hide and seek. It was near impossible to play a good game of hide and seek without it being dark. I looked on nature with appreciation because it gave me a place to blend in when there were no colors visible. As I grew older, the game evolved, but it was always outdoors in an area with abundant nature. When most people walk around at night and they see a shadow created by a bush, they fear what may be hiding within the nature. On the other hand, I seek to explore the nature and find what remains to be seen within the darkness.

One final thing that I love about nature at night is not the absence of sounds, but the abundance of the sounds that most people pay little attention to. As I walked, I listened to everything I heard. I noticed the leaves rustling in the wind as well as the skateboarders practicing off in the distance. The noise of a man searching a dumpster for cans was an unusual noise that caught my attention and ripped me away from the gently buzzing of the lights around campus. If given silence, nature does not hesitate to speak.