March 6- Attention to Water
The instructions for the prompt were to sit down in my place and slowly drink a cup or bottle of water. I filled up my water bottle that I take with me everywhere and walked outside to my place. I sat and took some sips of water as I was instructed to. Drinking water is not something that I pay very much attention to normally, since I have drunk water every single day of my entire life. However, it is important to think more deeply about it. I know that my water in Carlisle is municipally regulated and sanitized, and it is sourced as surface water, so from streams and rivers. I also know that the ecosystem around me also depends on basically this same water that I am drinking. Any disruptions to the normal rainfall and water cycles would have big effects on the land around me. However, this wouldn’t normally happen at my place on campus, as it is artificially irrigated by the campus landscaping department.
When thinking about the experience of drinking water and how it felt in my body, I remembered the privilege that I have, to not need to think about my water every day. In places where clean drinking water is scarce, it is a very pressing topic. The people in these places are under great amounts of stress every day to be able to find this invaluable resource for them to sustain life. Thankfully, I live in an area where we have so much abundance of potable water that this is not a concern for me.
I also feel that I have a pretty good grasp on the importance of clean water protection due to the classes I have taken in the past. My first-year seminar was about the economics of water scarcity and access to potable water, and many of my environmental science classes have focused on similar issues. Part of this experience I had in my place was reflecting on all the different capacities that I have learned about water in my classes. One fact that stuck with me from the reading in our textbook is the 71% of the Earth’s surface is water. This is a resource that all life on Earth depends on, so it makes sense that it would be in such large quantities. However, I recently learned in my Astrophysics course that the Earth’s entire mass is only 0.05% water. This is an incredible small amount of water in comparison to the rest of the Earth. This shows how different perspective really change how you view water. Since all life lives on the surface of Earth, 71% of the surface being water is much more relevant when thinking about living things. This is similar to how people experiencing drought will be much more conscious of their water usage. Attitudes and behaviors around water are entirely based on your own perspective.
April 24- Last Place Visit
Leaving the place is a little overwhelming. It felt more meaningful to me because it is also the end of the semester, and my place was right outside my dorm. This place won’t be my backyard anymore next semester, and that has a lot of feeling in it. It is still very happy though because it means I’m going home for the summer to New Jersey, which I am excited for. For my last place visit, I started by feeling my senses. I isolated each one of them to just observe my place. I smelled the fresh post-rain air, felt the humidity and sun, heard the many birds and few cars, saw the grass and earth and buildings and sky, and I actually forgot to do taste. This experiencing took up most of my time. For the rest of it and sat down in the Earth and just wanted to thank it for all it had given me. I also wanted to connect down to the smaller details I miss when viewing my place as a whole. I ended up peeling back some blades of grass and revealed these purple odd-shaped mushrooms I never would have seen if I wasn’t looking around. It reminded me of the awe podcast I listened to earlier in the semester and made me remember that when situations are big and overwhelming to just find the good in the details.
