Return to Ponds As I return to the Ponds I notice that they are surrounded by sidewalks-one of concrete and the other of gravel. This place is unusually quite and peaceful especially for being in the center of such a busy and fast paced campus. Yet, "there was in the landscape a sense of human occupation-so that one might have called it a park," E. M. Forster, p. 389. As we are sitting we are the human occupation of this pond park. Nature seems not to care of our presence for I just witnessed a male pigeon which seemed to be pursuing the love of a female; he chased her around for a few minutes until she flew away. As these pigeons play and as the turtles model they seem not uncomfortable with human presence, but rather at home with it. As if a distant and lost relative had been fund, these animals seem to enjoy our company. Maybe because now that we are being with nature here and now and not becoming anything, the old broken bonds that unite humans with nature have been mended, if only for an hour. Don’t know what it was, but I just looked up and saw a few pigeons perched above and thought to myself what if they need to relieve themselves, so I got up and moved to a safer spot. Could this have been nature who made me look up? Can I talk to nature if I took the time to be and not to become? These are the questions that I am pondering at the moment. Maybe it’s as Malinowski said in Vocabularies of Nature "animals serve as an intermediate link between man and nature,"(p. 350). Perhaps animals are the link that binds humans with the rest of nature, maybe they’re the unifying variable in combining all of God’s creations together as one. The depiction of unity here in this little place is great. We have the grass and trees which say together and the birds and squirrels that play together. There are the turtles that seem to reach out for their own identity, which is not unlike you and me. Us humans seem to be the final link, the missing piece of the puzzle that has strayed from home in search of self- actualization; we may be the piece that balances the scale, that unites through animals, with the rest of nature. Unity seems like a very good way to describe how nature is and looking from this point-of-view one can get a sense of how all of life is linked together like one big happy family. Humans are the ones who have broken this bond and only we can reconnect it.