Oneness with Nature on March 31, 2010

It’s spring in the university woods along the Ball Nature Trail and I feel calm, that is until a big black ball of fuzz buzzes past my ear. It’s a little past 1:30 in the afternoon as the rest of my class continues along the boardwalk leaving me all alone to sit and wait and listen to the nature around me. The boardwalk shakes just a bit as they walk off and then dies down the further away from me they get.

There’s a wooden bench attached to the boardwalk where they leave me, it’s a perfect spot for me to sit with my notebook and pen and write what I’m sensing. The bench is littered with small pink petals and twigs that have fallen from somewhere above me and so is the ground. 

As I sit quietly I notice a couple of inch long black ants crawling along the ground and up the sides of the wooden railing. As long as they don’t come close to me I don’t have a problem with them. The quiet is disrupted by a sudden rustling off into the distance in the bushes and then birds begin chirping and singing their spring songs. I’m surrounded by trees on all sides, some in full bloom others are still completely bare, having not recuperated from the long winter. 

Behind the bench, I can see the bayou and the water is a murky brown-green color and sits calm and still until a quick breeze blows by, sending ripples throughout the bayou. 

I decide to stand to get a better view of the area and I notice an ant approaching me, I quickly step to the side. As I move, another buzz zooms past my ear and I see the black ball of fur fly off into the trees. It turns back around and zooms past my ear yet again, I don’t think it helps that I’m wearing a coconut scented body spray. 

I look back at the bench I was once sitting on and three of those large ants have taken over it, no more of me sitting there. I decide to look closely at the trees opposite of the bench as the sun blazes on my back and shoulders in between the branches of the trees. On a nearby branch I notice something shimmer; as I get a closer look I notice that it’s a spider web. Red leaves have been caught in its grasp but there is no sight of its owner. 

I look to my right and there is a tall tree with a bush of bright green leaves at the very top yet the bark is shredding away like when a person shreds paper. It’s just stripping down the trunk of the tree in inch wide strips. 

There are trees everywhere, fallen and standing. There’s one on its side rotting away along the edge of the water. The fallen trees were most likely from a past storm and the few left standing are the survivors. When I look straight up I can see an array of colors ranging from green to red to orange and then there’s even pink. That’s where those pink petals came from. As I’m looking at the trees behind the bench I see another glimmer of a spider web but then…bang bang bang.

Before I can even think of looking for the spider a ruckus begins on the other side of the boardwalk. I try to ignore it until I hear my professor’s voice screaming out for us to come back in. It’s 2 p.m. and I got to experience the tranquilness of the nature trail for a half hour with no one bothering me, except for the occasional buzz by of a bumble bee and the fairly large black ants crawling a bit too close for comfort.