In this chapter Terry and her mother are in a monastery. Her mother says that she doesn’t think that monks are selfish human beings once she experiences the spiritual atmosphere inside the monastery. The prayer that they are chanting is about coming back home, Terry connects this with the Canadian Geese. Once the weather changes the Canadian Geese know when to prepare for the journey and they take off once it is the right time in harmony with all the other geese. She says that the migration of the birds is a cycle, they start from one point, reach their destination and then return back to their origin. I think she was trying to connect this with life and death.

She says that the beginning of life is clear, once we are born our life starts but the ending is very unclear. We are certain that there is going to be an ending but we don’t know when it is coming or in what form it is coming. I think this is how she sees her mother’s cancer, it is an unexpected and a distressing way for life to end.

This was way back when I was in 4th grade. I went to boarding school for a year. I didn’t understand why I had to go to boarding school back then, I knew my parents weren’t trying to punish me because I was a pretty good kid. We had applied for the day school option but the seats were all gone and they only had the boarding option left. It was too good of a chance to miss so they decided to send me to boarding school. My parents told me that the campus was located amidst of hills and the school often took its students for hiking and camping trips. That was the only reason I was OK with going to boarding school. I still remember the car ride to the campus, the roads were all dusty and swirly. As we got closer to the campus the scenery grew greener. The campus was actually located on a small hill. It extended from the base of the hill all the way to the top of the hill.

As months passed I missed home terribly. Often to cry and think about home I used to sneak out and hike down hill to this tiny greenhouse shed that was kept for nurturing annual flowers. It was located right next to a narrow stream that separated the campus from the surrounding community forest . I used to perch down on a slab of rock by the stream and listen to the slow water trickling down for as long as I could stay. As a kid I thought the stream was softly crying with me and I went there often because I felt like it was the only thing on campus that understood my tears. The mellow sound of the stream helped me calm down, it was almost like it was murmuring lullabies to make me feel comfortable.

On few occasions I heard large trucks pass through the forest, I knew there was a dusty path right through the forest but there were rarely any vehicles running on that track. The noises of vehicles however increased over time. I soon found out that the dusty road had been in process to be turned into a concrete road for a long time and it was finally happening. I was very disappointed because I could no longer just sit beside the stream and listen to the sound of the stream. I would always get interrupted by cars zooming past the road with their bright headlights on.

Although it was a bit chilly to be out in the farm for so long I had a great time listening to David Kline talk. I share the love of mashed potatoes with him. It is probably one of the only american food that I love. I am pretty sure the ones that I have had are only half as good as what he is used to eating. The way he described how the farm-made butter melts and compliments the mashed potato made my mouth water.He said that his mother used to make them with only 5 simple ingredients. It is incredible how 5 simple ingredients come together to make such a delightful dish. He made a connection between the simple ingredients coming together to make a great dish and simple words put together to make a captivating passage/text. I agree with him, sometimes the simplest of words have the most impact. It is like the 6 word story by Ernest Hemingway that he mentioned: ” For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.”

From the authors that we have read I relate the most to Annie Dillard. Pilgrim at tinker creek is beautifully written and it doesn’t feel like a chore reading her narrative. The two things I love about Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the way Dillard gives attention to details about the things she sees around the creek and about her experience there. It gives you a new way to look at everything and also it reminds you to look at things more closely. When you take time to look at things more closely then you see things you would have otherwise never seen. It was beautiful how she narrated seeing blood flow in the capillaries of the goldfish and the way she connected that with the flow of water in the creeks. “The red blood cells in the goldfish’s tail streamed and coursed through narrow channels invisible save for glistening threads of thickness in the general translucency. They never wavered or slowed or ceased flowing, like the creek itself; they streamed redly around, up, and on, one by one, more, and more, without end.” Her use of imagery is what made me hard to resist reading all the chapters at once. You never know what she is going to see in the creeks and what is even more exciting is the way she describes the simplest of things that she sees in the creeks.

 

 

 

After walking down the boardwalk for a while I wanted to find a bench that I could sit on and just enjoy the woods for a moment. I found a bench and sat on it and just as I was about to write about the things around me there was a spider crawling towards me. It was one of the really long legged spiders with a tiny body.  I jumped in fright and continued walking to find another spot to sit on. It may sound a bit too much but I felt like nature didn’t want me there and was shooing me away. As I was walking I stopped by a beautiful patch of Trout lilies, the sun was peek-a-booing through the tree leaves and it was hitting the patch like a spotlight. The lilies were yellowish orange in color and they looked like jewels under the sunlight. I heard something move beneath the patches so I squatted down to see what it was. There were a bunch of brown chipmunks with light brown strips that were gnawing on some sort of nuts. I was looking straight at one of the chipmunks. For a brief moment the chipmunk looked right back at me, it looked stunned but it didn’t move until it realized that I was an intruder. It scurried away right after and I felt uninvited yet again. I like to think that humans are a part of nature too but small moments like the ones I had that day at the woods makes me question if that is really true anymore.

It was a late afternoon when we started with the safari ride; we climbed on to our elephant rides and set off to the south end of Chitwan National park. It had just rained a while ago and the air felt damp, the forest was pretty dense, it was filled with subtropical Sal trees and shrubs of different kinds like local gooseberries and rosewood. It wasn’t extraordinary; we were just swaying from side to side as the elephant slowly walked through the forest, with our cameras ready hoping to spot an exotic animal or bird. Ideally we were hoping to see One-horned Rhinoceros or Bengal tigers; the closest we ever got was finding fresh Rhino trails from sometime during the day. The probability of seeing them is pretty low, currently the population of Rhinos is about 550 individuals and for the Bengal tigers it just 82-90 tigers.

However the park is home to 700 species which is a very high number for a national park with an area of only 360 sq mi. We spotted a bunch of Axis deer (Chital) herds and wild hogs which are some of the most common mammal species in the park. As we went through the forest we heard a lot of Cuckoo birds and Black crested Bulbuls. It was refreshing to hear the bird calls from all the bustling traffic noises that I hear every day when I am back home in the city. It felt strange but relaxing at the same time.

After a while we reached a small lake, it almost looked like a swamp. It was surrounded with luscious green plants and there were light pink lotus plants scattered on the surface of the pond. There was a cabin near the lake that had bathrooms and seats where you could rest. It looked very out of place; its placement there took so much of the park being natural away. These cabins were fairly new installations to the park; they were there for the park to be more accessible to tourists. After the conservation act in 1970 by the Nepali government to fully protect the national park, the conservation area was doing great in terms of species conservation and diversity but it felt a lot less natural than before. The park was modified a lot for tourists to easily access it and enjoy it. That took some part of the park being natural away.