Jenny Parker: Nature Setting II

Down at my favorite place again I just sat and watched the sunset, water washed up with a few ripples in the distance. As the wind picked up the water began hitting against the dead still rocks. The rocks took the beating of the water without any complaints; when however the tree did not live up to the rocks. The tree lay there helplessly with water swooshing up over it ever so often. Dead, the tree seemed. As Dillard says, "God's free-flowing Creation mingles the gentle current of a neighborhood creek with Melvillean apparitions of strife in the raging sea. Nature runs wild because God, too, is an untamed lover" (213).  As I sat there on the cement down by Lake Murray I too became a part of this, it was an encounter. I was not just observing or experiencing nature anymore. I was a part of it too. I sat there and let the sunset kiss my face as the water submerged my toes. I was not any different from the rocks at that time. I did not know it at the time but this was an encounter not an experience. It was reciprocity. I was "involved in touching and being touched by its particular array of rocks, trees, animals, and geographical features" (Lane, 44).