5/31/21

Birds chirp around me, but the helicopters above outweigh their soft whispers. To my left a musician plays classics and is cheered on by large crowds by the fountain. I hear people walking by, maybe on their way to grab a drink at the boat basin. The river is filled with people on romantic but overpriced row boats. Couples sit and smile and lean into each other. I want to be somewhere more alone. Where I can be tricked into feeling I have nature all to myself. I feel the earth below me as I lay on my stomach. The grass is patchy. The trees around me are lush and adjourned with endless green leaves. The water glistens and reflects the trees. The sky is a soft blue with just a few clouds. The sun is now blocked by a willow tree swaying to my right. Everyone is moving fast.

6/1/21

I sit on a bench in the Shakespeare garden. The sun beats down on my legs. Once again, a helicopter flies overhead. I hear the chirping of birds and the soft chatter of visitors. The flowers are bright, the purple circles remind me of a Dr.  Seuss book. The park is quite empty on this Tuesday, only occupied by individuals who truly desire to take the time to sit in nature. I feel connected to this woman through a shared love of Shakespeare even though I probably won’t say a word to her. So many people have wandered past me today in the forest. It is difficult to giv myself the freedom to let go. I try to stay present in what I’m reading, but my mind travels a million places. Must I get fully lost and be entirely alone to feel truly free? How do I get others to understand they deserve more freedom than they allow themselves to have?

6/8/21

 

I entered the pond, shivering but then submerged. The water embraced me. As my arms glided through I felt free. Free but how free can I feel if in the back of my head I’m wondering when I will get out or what creatures lay below me. I float. I think I feel free, but who’s to say. Life seems to be all about creating special moments to remember, but they’re so quickly a memory. I want to remember the exact feeling of safeness and knowing when I first reentered the bike path, wind in my hair or the first time I ever flew down the path on the back of a tandem bike with my dad or the very first time I rode a bike. I want to feel the chills on my stomach when they first graze the water. I want to taste my first bit of chicken sandwich at Cobies. But i can only remember the memory.

6/9/21

Sometimes I wish I could pause or turn back time. I regret what I didn’t do and so badly want to try again. Do better. But now that one moment is clumped with all the rest of the past. Taking in that one moment, this moment as fully as we possibly can. Sometimes I just feel so lost. And I want it all to stop. And to have no worries and for everything to fall into place. In so many books I read people must lose everything to achieve true freedom. I’m always planning and then once a moment has passed I wonder if I was even living in it.  Or was my body just there and not me. I need to stop taking life so seriously. There is not one path for me or this project so I need to stop asking people for advice. I am in the front seat. Just drive. I will find the way

6/24/21

 

I was journaling in Central Park after watching a recording of Twelfth Night and I was in the way of a yoga class so I scooched out of the way, but the music the instructor was playing was calling my name. Immediately when I heard myself saying in the back of my head that I didn’t have time, I knew I had to do it. We are always moving so fast and many people never stop for the beautiful moments. I heard planes around me, prosecco popping and laughter, but also felt the ground below me, the grass in my fingertips. My heart was racing when I lost balance in fear of not being perfect. I worried someone I knew might see me. My “reasonable” thoughts. Breathe them away. Release them into the world. I felt so at peace during savasana. I have to let go of what those around me see as reasonable and be present. Allow myself to feel free, to experience nature, to be transformed, to abandon reason, to lose myself. And it feels great. Not take life too seriously, be present, take deep breaths, absorb my surroundings, follow my gut.

6/30/21 

There is so much to consume and not enough time. I am amazed by the incredible ideas these books uncover but it is so hard to remain present. I am always thinking about the next thing and then suddenly the day is done. During the day I am doing work where I am trying to lose myself, to transform but then I get caught up with making plans for later. I want to get lost in the magical worlds I’m exploring, but I also feel a pressure to see everyone I know and that time is going by so quickly. I need to be in touch with what my gut truly wants, not the plans I feel I should make or what I should do to make sure I am remembered by so and so. It is hard being pulled in two worlds simultaneously. This one seems to have a stronger pull, I still feel this underlying obligation to do things in the world of reason. I want to let go of people who pull me away from my forest. I want to live and lay in the forest.

7/14/21

I feel deprived from diving into Shakespeare and understanding nature from different contexts. However, the pastorality I have been surrounded by is quite amazing. Each tree and feld is endlessly lush. Which brings me to rain. It seems to make a continued appearance. And as I crave the sunshine, I sit outside, enduring the brisk, windy weather, reminding myself how this will soon make me deeply appreciate the blue skies that always do eventually come. It is interesting how others choose to soak in the world. I am continuously amazed as I drive through the French countryside or when cows fill our backyard or we pass by horses. Others seem less impressed. Some maybe because they have been trained to live a life less motivated by reason and feel like it is too child-like to show extreme excitement or skip or scream. I try to challenge these notions like today going on fair rides with my dad and on bumper cars. It seemed like a weight of stress lifted off of him. Sometimes acting like a child allows for this. There are no sounds of helicopters or cars rushing past, only wind on trees and cows mooing and dogs howling and chickens. And laughter inside, but I could feel I wanted to write. I wanted to enter into the second world, escape, be with myself, touch base, be here and take in this moment. It feels like time is rushing by while I’m simultaneously in this place that time stops. It is challenging being exclusively surrounded by people who don’t understand the journey I’m going on, which is why rather than getting caught up in that, I am continuing to be in touch with myself or prioritizing what I need in a moment and trying to embrace what makes me feel most free and embracing my gut. I am cold and want a blanket but I don’t want to exit this world and enter into an alternate one when I feel very present in this space so maybe I will sit with the uncomfortability.

7/22/21

And she didn’t write. For the whole forest. And she left the pastoral paradise and asked why? What a waste. A waste of beauty. A waste of respite. All a waste. Why didn’t she write? Why didn’t she fill pages with descriptions of the beauty? To recall each intricate detail to recall this place of wonder when she’s forgotten. Just the sounds of the wind in the trees and some woos or kaws. No helicopters or traffic. But there was so much traffic. SO much buzz. SO many people around with different desires and different ways of living. I craved someone who would embrace beauty like I did so I would feel less alone. My youthful spirit and fascination and love for nature was not understood. Because they each had their own way of soaking it up. Because no one was as absorbed as I was, I craved alone time but the places of beauty were never able to be embraced by myself.

7/23/21

Time feels fleeting in the city but relative in the country. I wake up more easily in the city et ouvre une fenetre and feel the city is alive. In the country it feels I live in my own small universe. Time moves more slowly. It makes no difference if you waste it because it still rushes by. In the city everyone has a destination, but in the country one can try to forget the outside world. It wasn’t until this past year that I realized how much I needed time to myself. How deprived I feel without it. It refuels and recenters me. Yes the country was incredibly pastoral and could have been my forest but the people there didn’t encourage me to have an enlightening pastoral experience because I didn’t feel safe and vulnerable enough to go on the journey. Maybe my forest, like Viola, isn't just nature, but a new climate where I find profound beauty and see the new climate where I find profound beauty and see the potential for me to explore myself in new ways and discover new things, comme Paris.

8/4/21

Nature seems to amaze me less lately. I feel slightly numb. I want time to stop or go backwards so I can live better. But now that time has gone. It has vanished and will never return. It is irreplaceable. Impossible to recreate. I can’t be in my forest when time won’t stop for me. It continues to move. To race. Today I am surrounded by the city. But not a beautiful, glorified environment. Just a street: with bikes and construction and alarms and cars and sirens. A street I know. That I have walked day after day thousands upon thousands of times. Right now I am having trouble remembering the good in the world. The magical memories I’ve had. Why do I feel like everyone around me has everything figured out but I feel so profoundly lost. I have noticed myself trying to be “reasonable.” Not acknowledging how I must separate from reason to go on the journey. I do feel transformed, but why do I feel like right now I have only been changed in negative ways, I feel more lost right now than necessarily losing myself.

8/5/21

Central Park feels less private than it used to. It is filled with people speaking all different languages. Some people have a destination: a man in a suit on the phone, walking his dog quickly. But others like the tattooed arm man sitting on a bench to my left with a red highlighter for his book which looks like a play, there are large families talking together and pigeons flapping their wings.

8/9/21

 

The library feels different now that reservations are not required. You can enter without planning to. My first month of doing this work I was idealizing the world. I was focused on the beauty and magic this work was exposing me to. But the forest isn’t all beautiful. There are a lot of dark aspects. The world is not exclusively beautiful. There is loss and grief and pain and helplessness and sadness and emptiness and purposelessness. 

9/14/21

 

Dead leaves fall onto my head. They are a yellowy brown and hiding away. Their death gives way for new leaves to grow. I sit in this nature forward landscape and bask in iits beauty and inspiration while acknowledging I will never be able to take it all in. There are endless details. The trees overhead look infinite. They began to take root long before I walked this earth and will far out live my legacy as well. They are lush and overwhelming and bright. There are so many shades of green on the hilly waves of this forest of the highway. Each leaf is essential to cultivating this oasis but most are overlooked. Maybe the beauty is briefly acknowledged but it is fleeting. I am overwhelmed with gratitude for this lush beauty and how it transformed and teleported me and allowed me to see the world differently for a brief moment and escape. What a glorious thing to be alive and bask in the world’s beauty and breathe its air. Wow. The trees are tall and thin and textured. The air hums and birds sing and trees sway and I sit and attempt to take it in.

9/22/21

 

Today the rain does not seem to be bothering me. It is quite cozy in fact. Allowing me to indulge in warm, cozy liquids. I am aware of being drawn to my forest world and other universes serving me less, but I am accepting that that is indeed acceptable. I must lean into finding the structure so that I am again given the freedom to explore these forest worlds

11/4/21

Energy is pulsing through me. LIVE THEATER. The hour before I was bursting with energy and joy–what a high. The most magical feeling it’s so magical. WOW I just feel so alive. I’m still buzzing. This place, Schaefer theatre, is such a holy place for me. Of so much growth and change. A magical respite from the rest of Duke. That virtually no one understands. Or only those that have performed here. I will constantly crave this feeling. It’s addictive and magical and sensational.