Julia Schwartz

April 28, 2003

            “What are you looking for?” My brother.
            “Nothing.” Me.

            “You’re just walking around looking at the ground?”

            “Mmhmm…”

            Yards are a wonderful thing. I often hear adults reminiscing of their youth, and time after time they come back to the sense of adventure their backyards beckoned to them with. Driving through the hills of rural New England this past week, I saw the adventures some children might have, wished I too could have been a part of a barefoot sprint up a hill to build a fairyland within the confines of a crumbling barn. For what was my backyard? What had it been? It had been the home to a swingset, more or less. Home to no epic journey to save the world, to no Wild West land filled with cowboys and cockfights.

            I have, however, begun to find the adventure in my yard, realized the best adventures need not this sort of Mark Twain freedom, just an open mind willing to wander.

I love the sun. I love the first real day of spring, when you can go outside barefoot and feel the individual shards of grass crawling within your toes, when you can feel the heat that sustains all things on this planet washing over your skin that has been hidden for so long under wool sweaters and coats. I love the silence on these days, the stillness, and the secret knowledge that so much is at work on a day such as this. Crouching upon the side of the small hill that graces the edge of my front lawn, I heard the wind first, moving the leaves, initiating that well-loved rustle of nature that is so attached to the quaint countryside. This wind, this gentle sound, I noted, was the only motion within this small radius that was that which was in my field of vision. It was the only motion, the only thing to save me from falling completely into a pathless reverie, the only thing to keep me still in this world.

            Nature still amazes me. Though I am no longer a toddler, I still grasp at the chance to see with new eyes, or merely to see everything. It is this quality, born out of a tremendous curiosity to understand the workings of whatever controls us, that seizes me each time I am presented with something beautiful outside my windows – a cascade of snow, a deluge of thick raindrops, the hug of the sun and the kiss of the cool breeze. I find it amazing that in all seasons, the outdoors can provide more comfort than anything we have yielded through all our technology. The snow forms the most perfect bed anyone could imagine, the sun the best heat, the stars the most simple beauty, the rain the best cleansing, the grass the most perfect city.

            Sometime within the range of a handful of months ago, I began to slowly ruminate until coming to a place where I despise technology for what it has done to our society. We are altogether too dependent on it, myself included, and it frustrates me, because I see our thirst for technology as our ultimate downfall as a human race, for it enables us to not only become lazier and less personal, but it enables us to do more – and in so doing, causes us to do less.

            When was the last time I could be satisfied with the grass alone? When did I last take the time to experiment with the overlapping vision of one eye? I found out long ago that everything near to your face moves when one eye or the other is closed, realized that you can hold a hand sideways to your nose and alternate which eye is open and thus alternate which side of the world you see. (Or, when that same hand is in front of your nose, both eyes open will see both sides, and it almost seems that the hand barely exists, for you can more or less see across it.) Yet with my head pressed down to the ground, and the vision of one eye largely obscured, I found the unobstructed eye saw the world on the ground – the sea of small green shoots, reaching toward the sky, strewn among one another as though they needed no control, then slowing blending together, their edges becoming blurred. The other eye, however, was not to be forsaken. Now that eye stared at my palm, face down on the ground covered by the bright blue towel. And then my eyes granted me a new vision: the sea of grass, seen through my nearly transparent hand resting on the fuzzy blue. Neither picture was precise; yet together, I saw all I needed to.

            I took a walk, a mythic journey sprung from a spinning strand of moss and its shadow. Yet the best thing about the so-called mythic journey is that it took no heroine, no tragedy, not even a new location. No, the journey was mythic because it was priceless, something to add to the cauldron that eventually gives rise to a new being, for what crawls out of that pot is indeed a completed soul, a finished person – the contented self.

            On my journey through my yard, I was aware of myself slipping slowly into the past, my body being slowly taken over by the mind of a child who still needs to discover the world. Yet at the same time, I felt the wisdom of a sage, a prophet; the calm of the enlightened one. I discovered new things. A hapless twig, seemingly so insignificant and useless, suddenly became Nature embodied. The split shell of the twig, the nascent bark, was a source of wonder. To snap the twig into pieces, an experiment to rival the most scientific. For as it turned out, if a snap was executed randomly, the likelihood was that it would snap at a location already marred by the broken bark. A snap urged to occur in a location not already revealed was possible, but not clean and flat like those occurring in the present breaks; instead, they were jagged and narrow, often yielding twin planes, as a rough cliff upon the side of a mountain.

            Pealing the thin bark away from the remaining part of the twig was the next stage of exploration, a move that brought forth the most interesting result. The shell separated cleanly from the inner meat of the twig, taking away the protective shield of the bark. Peeling apart the meat as one might a piece of string cheese was not entirely possible with this type of twig, most likely from some sort of oak or maple tree. (It was too brittle and smooth to be of the pine variety.) Instead, there was a new snap somewhere yet untouched upon the small twig, and the inside was examined. It was as a bundle of tiny fibers, just like the human muscle. But the most human part of this twig was the thin red center vein – just like a human’s. There were now two halves of the whole, each with a thin red spot staining its center. They looked like eyes, I thought. They were slightly flat, at they stained out a bit at either edge. Eyes. One way they looked sad and forlorn. Can I make angry eyes? A small motion of my thumb and forefingers spun them around. The face with nothing but eyes was now angry. Spin – sad again. Spin – chuckling. Spin – scary. Spin – cat’s eyes. Spin. Spin.

            Now satisfied I knew everything there was to know about that tiny, five-inch twig, I flung it aside, to return to its peaceful sea of grass. I saw to my side a pine branch, with needles still attached. Pine branches were, I realized, something that amused me when I was younger, as well. Hunched up on the side of the little hill, I stared at the pine branch. Pine branches are like brooms; I think that is one reason they used to entice me. I popped one tiny bundle of pine needles off the branch. I love the way the little brown cup at the bottom that holds the needles together pops cleanly out of the branch, leaving behind a raised cavern, like a meteor had hit and since departed – and a tiny wetness appears, the remnants of the pitch which soaks the pine.  How many needles, I wondered. I counted. Five. But wait -- I knew that. And at that point, I distinctly remembered counting the needles like this in the past. Five. It was always five. Every bundle on every branch from every tree. Never four, never six. Always five. It used to drive me crazy, that there were always five. But now I only wonder why. Why five? And I am amazed again by nature. How many millions of tiny bundles of pine needles must there be in this world, I think. And all with five needles. Nature is more perfect than anything man might create.

            I saw much more this morning that I could tell of, and could have stayed so much longer exploring everything, for to encompass the whole yard in detail would take an eternity. Yet I knew I must move on, on to other things, to reenter the world that I have been born into – a world of what’s next, not a world of simply being. As I walked back to my house, I thought again of the changing seasons, how the landscape changes so drastically, yet is always the same. Just a few months ago I was watching the world in the same way, when everything was covered in snow. Now it is revealed; the snowy blanket it peeled away and we enter a new season. And this is what I love about the world right now. There is so much to amaze me, in so many ways. To revert back into the natural world is endless entertainment, and it is all beautiful when looked at long enough – even the most basic twig lying forgotten on the side of a tiny but rarely visited hill. On Seeing, I thought. I have seen again.