Final Waller Creek Journal
Amanda Dulcinea Cuéllar
I sit right now before the window and the raging creek. In the back of my mind whirs the realization that I am wet, my books are wet, and I have a quiz today in chemistry. Worries, hopes, and discomfort linger in my thoughts. How to escape them? How to cultivate the “intuitive awareness—that links us most intimately to the universe” (Dass 75)? Have I lost the ability to “know what a simple thing is” (The Mystery 683)? In my daily life I think I have. As I walk through campus I forget the great mystery that our existence is. I choose to make today different.
My eyes fall on the violent flow of the water in that creek that was once so welcoming. Why is it that now, when nature reveals a different and equally beautiful side to us, it becomes violent, cruel, raging? Is it perhaps because now nature disagrees with us? Has it fallen from our grace by becoming uncontrollable, unpredictable? I hate how “nature is always composed within a specific frame of motives and expectations” (Burch 863). We expect nature to always agree with us, to smile on us, and when it doesn’t it is bad, ugly. Today, as I walked to class I did my best to avoid the cold rain and lamented that our last class outing of the semester had to be on such an awful day. But what is so terrible about this day?
I have thought much about this fictional dualism of good and bad that I have grown up believing in. I always thought colors remained inside thick black dams, but as I see more of the world I realize there is no pure color, no thick delineation, only a muddled grey. Likewise, nothing in this world is completely good nor bad. I was unaware of “possibilities of the simultaneous presence of both [sides of a duality] and of a larger whole which contains both opposites” (Bump 862).
Suddenly the rain begins again, and I long to be outside, to experience nature uninhibited in all of its temperaments. I want to “be unashamed of my soul/As earth lies bare to heaven above,” (Browning 860) and, as I bare my soul to nature, I wish to “penetrate the barrier space puts between” (Bate 684) me and Waller Creek. In order to have a true communion with nature I must do more than lounge in the sun and wet my feet in a calm stream. “Though our brother is on the rack, as long as we ourselves are at ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers[;] they never did and never can carry beyond our persons” (Smith 685). I cannot extend my sympathetic imagination to nature by watching the rushing water through the glass walls of the
I am at the place where we were that one day, and it is completely different. I am cold, I am wet, and I am content to be at one with nature. I walked down the sandy bank of the creek and saw “the force that drives the water through the rocks [and also] drives my red blood” (Thomas 667). Yet I realize that my communion is not complete. I have not wallowed in the mud nor rushed down the stream with the flood waters; instead I observe the swift water from the safety of the bank. I am yet protected from the elements by my human garb, but I am closer than I have ever been before to leaving my inhibition and human tendencies behind, to being nature.
In this moment I feel a greater force present. It is my god. Not the god of the Christian church, but a kind of unifying force; a sort of universal order that keeps the world spinning. This force, be it nature itself, seems even more intense in moments like these when it becomes apparent how small and insignificant man really is. In this moment I feel the passion of nature and my ties to it. I see how I am intimately tied to the universe; I am in awe and dwarfed by this knowledge. I know this realization is a gift, a glimmer to lighten the dreary days when I feel desolate and without hope. I am part of a greater whole; I am this rushing, beautiful stream. I am “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower ….” (Thomas 667).
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