During my trip to Johnson’s woods, I noticed one thing that for the most part remains constant throughout time. Besides winter, when the trees become bare and snow covers the ground, the sunshine that sneaks through the leaves on the tree stands out to me. It was interesting to notice the rare cases when the light poked itself through. When I was walking through, I was mostly thinking about the environment and what the sunlight does for the surrounding ecosystem. Sunlight could be one of the more natural things in this world, because of how constant it always is. How does the sunlight interact with the plants that grow during the summer vs. the winter? What confuses me is how little of sunlight things need to grow. In most cases, the sun transfers its energy to plants and trees that are taller. What does that mean for the smaller shrubs that grow closer to the ground? Surely it must impact their life span to a duration in which the warm ground can interact with rainwater. I assume most of these smaller plants die off around October, when the leaves begin to fall. Nature really sticks out more to me when you can see many different colors while walking through an extremely wooded area. The amount of green made me feel like I was in a unique place, and that can be directly correlated to the sun’s powerful rays.
When thinking about the future, it seeks to confuse me. In the next couple of months, the leaves will fall off the big trees, exposing the smaller trees and plants to sunlight, some of the only sun they get throughout the year–besides that of the sun occasionally poking through the small slots in the big trees–but most of them end up dying. The life cycle of natural plants is wild, and when you think too much about it, it starts to make less and less sense.
I think your account of Johnson’s Woods does a nice job of providing a sense of setting in the opening sentences. You employ imagery of the sunlight, and I found this enjoyable because it was not one of the things that caught my eye during the trip.
The one thing I would disagree with in your piece is the idea that continuity is a key to determining how natural something is. Human products, such as Styrofoam, last a long time despite the decomposing processes of the earth. I’d look at your criteria of naturalness more closely to avoid this issue and maybe define the sun as natural in another way beside persistence over time.