I set off on a sunny but cool day to find my place for the semester. I needed to find a place that could erase the town around me so I could face the present moment and surroundings. I found that place along an eastern section of White Clay Creek. A hop, skip and a jump away from my apartment- I would have no excuse not to find myself here routinely.

Here I notice many things. First, I notice the water level is higher today from the weekend rain. The water lay still though, and I am only able to sense its movement from the fallen leaves that lay atop. The occasional breeze and fallen leaves remind me that autumn will be here soon. Soon an array of red, brown, and orange leaves will blanket the creek and ground around me. The vegetation will slowly die as Winter creeps by, too. This first dose of Autumn, however, is what I find the most beautiful. Plenty of green foliage, scatters of birds and squirrels, an outdoor house cat running behind me, and a fisherman in the distance. Today, I am even fortunate enough to see a Blue Herring across the creek. It seems that around this time of year, there is always a Blue Herring standing on a log across the creek.

As I admire the beauty of the creek and its inhabitants, I realize I don’t know much about the systems that balance among it. My understanding of the nature around me is mostly of its aesthetic. I reflect on the words of Aldo Leopold, “Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language” (Leopold, 96). It slightly pains my soul that neither words or pictures can grasp the beauty of the creek or my appreciation for this environment.

I like to think that I am a decently observant person when it comes to the outside world. I spent a lot of time in the woods of Kentucky this summer, and had plenty of time to notice the plants and insects. Unfortunately, I never saw much wildlife as I wasn’t near any flowing water. Poison ivy, poison oak, poison sumac, and fire ants were of my main concern so I acquired quite the eye for these not so pretty (or valuable?) plants. I would lay there on the ground and study the movements of beetles and ants, the fungus and vines growing up trees, and the poison foliage that I attempted to stay away from. While I notice the smaller parts that make up the ecosystem around me, I’m still unable to identify many.

As I reconnect with my Creekside in Newark, Delaware, I realize there is much that I overlook when trying to connect with the world around me. Sometimes, looking at the our little critters and flora, blinds us to the bigger picture and systematic flows around us. Sometimes, we are blinded by the beautiful. The words of Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac depict this further in his ‘Come High Water’ essay. He addresses the April river floods from upstream snow melt and the lumbar it washes up on his farm. He sometimes can estimate how many floods a piece of wood has been through. Something as simple as a pile of scrap wood is seemingly more; “Our lumbar pile, recruited entirely from the river, is thus not only a collection of personalities, but an anthology of human strivings in upriver farms and forests (Leopold, 25).” The essays of Leopold somehow capture a beauty and understanding of the surrounding environment that I find myself wishing I could see what the words leave out.