The sun made an appearance this past week. And I wasn’t the only one who noticed. On my most recent venture out to Blunn Creek for my Travis County blog, the nature preserve seemed larger, more vibrant, and healthier than I’d ever seen it before. Blossoms were opening, including those of my favorite tree, Texas Mountain Laurel. In my front yard back in San Antonio, my mom has two of these trees planted, so the grape-like smell always brings me back to memories of home.
I also noticed a total lack of litter on this month’s trek out to Blunn Creek. I was astonished and overjoyed to see such a beautiful change occur in one of my favorite spots in Austin. I know that I’ve done my best to pick up any obvious trash on the creek bed whenever I make a trip out, and it appears that others may be doing the same. Whatever the case may be, I had a new kind of experience this month in Blunn. The area seemed pristine, untouched, despite being a popular walking trail for many SEU students and Austinites alike.
Walking around the creek bed, I felt my stress levels drop. The past two weeks had been particularly stressful with tests, quizzes, papers, and projects. With so many obligations, I had barely spent a moment outside. The only trees I’d seen lately were the cedars that line my walk from Le Mans to Moody. For the first time in weeks, it felt like I could really take a breath. There’s a remarkable difference between taking a breath of AC inside my cushy dorm room, and taking a breath of air outside in the natural, real world. My mind went blank, and I just sat there on the creek bed, observing. Not talking, not thinking. Just watching and listening.
It wasn’t until my phone buzzed that I realized I’d been sitting there nearly two hours. I had needed that stillness. It was a bit disorienting to stand back up and walk back out of the nature preserve, back to campus. I felt like I was gliding through the woods, that everything was moving a bit quicker than usual. It felt like only a moment had passed when I reached the main drive of St. Ed’s again.
Meditating out in the woods is a practice I never had really experienced before. In the past, I’ve only ever sat to clear my mind in my room, as a way of taking a break from a long study session or after an argument with someone. It was a totally new prayerful experience to meditate by the creek–to listen to actual water gently rushing by, rather than the sounds of rushing water being replicated on my Pandora music station. I had an incredible sense of peace, of contentment as I reached home again. I still had a few assignments to continue working on, but it didn’t seem so overwhelming as it did before sitting out in Blunn. As I contemplated on this relationship between nature and school, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a passage Aldo Leopold once wrote in A Sand County Almanac, which reads “the problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education.”