My roots are in the woods. My family’s Southern Delaware home is deeply nestled in the forest, an isolating paradise for my bird-watching mother and a natural inspiration to my woodworking father. The moment I read that 80% of my grade would be based on weekly nature journal entries, I knew it would give me an ideal escape, teleporting me back to one of my favorite places. So, thanks for the great assignment idea!

As I was walking down White Clay Drive, I saw the rustic park sign. At first I thought I should walk a little farther down the street and search harder to find my own “spot” in the woods. After all, I’d be dissecting it through observations all semester…should it not be a spot worthy of dissecting? But the 4:00 PM sun seemed to be positioned directly onto the wooded background of that sign, laying an illuminated path on the footprints reaching past it. I squinted questioningly down the street once again before turning my attention back to the sunbeams’ playful dance on the snow’s blanket. I followed the footprints. I can always explore a little more, I thought, if this isn’t the view I’m looking for.

The snowy result of the uncharacteristic winter we’ve had this year piled high on the ground but exposed the end of a log large enough to be a comfortable, dry seat. I situated myself, lifted my eyes to examine my view, and watched my skepticism of choosing this seemingly obvious spot float out of my mind and dissolve completely. From my seat, a pair of great birch trees framed a portion of the creek, complete with couples’ initials and the typical “(insert name) was here,” scrawling. They had deep knots and thick branches reaching to embrace the sky and, in the space between them, thinner branches slightly obstructed the view of the water. I knew right away that in a month, this would be a scene of metamorphosis.

Soon enough, I’d be squinting through the windows of vibrant leaves at the rippling reflections on the creek. I knew that as the second semester of my freshman year bloomed and transformed and continued to come alive, so would this spot. As I met new people, new names would be scratched into the bark. As the reflection of my personality altered, I’d see a new color palette mirrored onto the water. Though a seemingly simple choice in spots, this birch archway provided the necessary framework for both observing and experiencing transformation.

I took a 360 degree survey of this new subject for dissection. Behind me, the sun’s gradual descent stratified the glistening snow with the tree’s shadows. To my left, sheets of ice met between tree stumps and the water they’d soon fade into. Across the creek, the bank of rocks peaked out from the snow and accepted the water’s gentle lapping. This movement of water, any movement of water, always interested me: some parts flow so smoothly while others shift to kiss the land, while still others resemble vibrating sound waves. There are also those parts that halt in their downstream trek due to obstructions invisible to the distant, land-dwelling eye. The upstream bend that I can’t see fully is calm, collected, until a point directly in my vision where the water’s activity is altered drastically. It’s just a dam of some sort, but the fact that I can’t clearly see it makes me think of all the obstacles in my own mind, in every human’s mind, that others can’t see or understand. The buried causes reveal their effects through our actions, and the buried obstacles reveal themselves through the water’s diversions. Even though we often speak of it as an entirely separate entity, we are a part of nature as natural beings, and we inevitably mimic it.

Nature mimics itself in other ways as well, as patterns repeat themselves in many forms and objects from different areas mirror one another flawlessly. The chill of winter left me with low expectations for seeing animals and left me to settle with the harmony of birds chirping. But just as I packed up to leave, two ducks trotted down to the creek’s edge together. An emerald-billed male and his tawny mate skated across the water on their bellies and shaped the same “V” on the water that a gaggle of geese would in the sky. This repetitious habit of the world reveals itself again in the raised brown bumps on my log-seat that mimic the barnacles of the ocean’s jetty at home that my father and I love to fish off of. Some scientific, some maybe just coincidental, the repetitions connect everything on the planet, including us. That’s something I’d like to explore more.

I shivered for the ducks as they ventured back and forth down the creek. It was particularly active today, reminding me of the ocean’s increased ferocity in the winter. There are moments when winter is my favorite season. I love to watch plants peak out of the soil and the floral brilliance paint the world in the warmer months, but these months provide an entirely different type of perspective if you allow them to. It can seem as if the planet’s been stripped of its beauty, like the hues have been drained through a syringe. But I like to think that its foundations have just been exposed, bare bones and all, to provide a different sort of beauty. The winter roots up our world in its most simple version. It is functional despite being devoid of its typical beauty, and the bare bark of the branches and chilly shine of the water mix with the purity of the snow for a new type of luminescence. Is that something we could all learn from? The stillness of the planet during its lack of embellishment has never spoken “ugly,” to me. It speaks “real,” “naked,” “vulnerable.” Exposure isn’t entirely bad, and, as this week’s reading from What’s Gotten Into Us? explores, we hide ourselves from exposure at a destructive cost.

While I read about the harmfulness of the chemicals many of us are blind to, I couldn’t help but think about the simplicity of one part of the solution: we just need to stop hiding from our natural state. The make-up, the colognes, the synthetic clothing material, the prescriptions that “fix” our natural minds. All of these toxin packed items created for “aiding to our natural goodness” are really just slowly disposing of us. There is such an immense fear of going without all that, of exposing our natural, real selves, embracing our own “winter,” you could say. Fear is a potent, piercing emotion, giving it power and control. I really wonder what it would look like, but more importantly FEEL like, if we all altered such a powerful emotion into something positive, the opposite of this irrational fear of our vulnerable and natural selves. If we were all our most simple versions, full of embracement and acceptance of it, I think the atmosphere’s entire vibe might change, not just our actions. That obvious but ideal forest spot I uncovered this afternoon revealed something incredible, even ironically complex, about simplicity. What could humans reveal about it?