"Keep Moving Forward"

One of my favorite quotes is from a very smart man by the name of Walt Disney. He said “We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”  This quote embodies what this class has done for me.  Through the various texts that we have read in class, this class has “opened new door” that have lead to me “doing new things” in and for my life.  

         In mid October, we began reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. In this book, Kingsolver and her family retell the story of how they lived off the land for an entire year. At the beginning of the book, Kingsolver’s husband Steven L. Hopp opened my eyes to a very interesting statistic. He said “If every U.S citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our countries oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week.”  For me this was enough incentive to start eating locally and organically.

            Another text that we read that really inspired me is an excerpt from John Burroughs’ essay “The Art of Seeing Things”. In this essay he describes how a lot of the time we go through life and never really notice the things around us. He says that we need to stop and consider seeing things “as an art”. He says that just like art, to really see things takes practice; we need to slow down and take the time to practice really seeing what is around us. Burroughs’ text inspired me in quite the same way as Kingsolver’s text in that I am striving to at least once a week take a walk in nature and really see what’s happening around me.

            Finally, one of the most important things that this class did for me is open my eyes to how much I love my home state of Michigan. One of the most memorable guest lecturers was Allison Swan. When she came in, we discussed her book Fresh Water: Women Writing on the Great Lakes. In Judith Minty’s essay “HOMES: Living with Lake Michigan”, she writes about remember how she once learned all the names of the Great Lakes with the mnemonic device HOMES.

            “Homes: It was our third-grade lesson when we studied Michigan geography, our mnemonic device, a way to remember the names of those five Great Lakes that surround the peninsula where we lived: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. For me, I thought I really were home- where I had originated, where I belonged.”

After reading this essay, I realized how important home and place is to me. I am proud to say that Michigan is my home. 

Alaska is.

"Alaska is unexplainable. When people describe Alaska to you, you can only imagine the little beauties; the beautiful trees, the amazing flowers, and the mighty mountains. Until you get here, you only have broken pictures in your mind. When you do get here, all the missing elements get put together. Alaska is the most amazing place I’ve ever been, and always has a special place in my heart." -Jennifer Long 2006
      As many of you know from reading my past blog entries, I am truly passionate about a little place called Alaska. Above is a small blurb that I wrote for the Alaska Great Lakes Project (AGLP) website back in 2006. Our assignment was to finish the sentence "Alaska is...". After rereading my entry, I find that my feelings about this place have not really changed at all since that summer. In fact, because of my absence for so many summers, I feel like my feelings have only grown a lot stronger. 
     Since 2006, I have gone through many changes in my life. I graduated high school, survived my first year in college, bought a house, adopted a puppy, moved out of my childhood home, and in through all of this grew closer to my family. I have become a person who is passionate about school and about life. 
    Over the past few weeks I have been thinking greatly about whether it is time for me to go back to Alaska with AGLP. In these last few days, I have made my decision. In the summer of 2010, I am going back to my second home and my first love. I am returning to Alaska. 
  
 Please feel free to visit our website at www.aglp.com and post any questions that you might have about the trip here. 

Why I love Jack Johnson...

Ever since I went on my first trip to Alaska in 2005, I have been a huge fan of Jack Johnson and his music. His mellow and acoustic sound has always been something that I have greatly enjoyed. But it is not just his musicianship that makes me love Jack Johnson. It is much more.   

     Jack Johnson was born, raised, and still resides in Oahu, Hawaii.  He grew up on the north shore of the island with his famous surfer father, Jeff Johnson, who taught Jack how to surf at a young age. When Jack was 17, he became the youngest competitor in the Pipeline Masters competition. Before becoming a professional musician, Jack went to the University of California and graduated with a degree in film. He then went on to make surf movies. Jack released his first solo album as a musician, Brushfire Fairytales, in February 2001.

     Over the years, Jack has been an active environmentalist. Currently this year on his To the Sea tour, Jack’s “All at Once” campaign is focused on supporting non-profit organizations centered on sustainable food systems and plastic free initiatives. While on stage, Jack and his band are using reusable water bottles and drinking tap water that is filtered through Britta water filters. Also, Jack and the band are striving to make their tour “zero waste events” by recycling and composting in order to reduce the amount of waste at each of their venues. At every Jack Johnson concert there are recycling and composting stations set up in and around the concert space in order to also help with the recycling and composting project. As for food at his events, Jack’s tour catering works with local farms in order to promote healthy and sustainable organic eating.

     Jack’s efforts in sustainability and environmental conservation are very inspiring to me and many other fans of his music. For more information about Jack Johnson and his work, please visit his website at www.jackjohnsonmusic.com.

Dear Snow,

Here’s the thing. You make the trees look really pretty and skiing a lot of fun. I’ll give you that. But, on the down side, you do a ton of things that I really do not approve of. Let me just lay out a few of these things for you.

First of all, for some reason, whenever you come to visit for the first time in Michigan, everyone forgets how to drive in you. This means there is a ton of accidents from people forgetting how slippery you make the roads and sliding through intersections almost inevitable.

Second of all, you somehow find a way to add an extra ten minutes to all of my trips because I am forced to stand in the freezing cold with a flimsy piece of plastic scraping you off my windshield.  I wish there was a way we could make a deal so that you would somehow just miss landing on my windshield and land somewhere else. If this works for you, let me know.

Third of all, you are a huge pain to clean up. Unfortunately, because I am a poor college student and cannot afford a snow blower, I am forced to use an old snow shovel from when I was in elementary school to clean off my driveway. And for some reason, no matter when I am out removing a part of you from my driveway, you just end up where I just got done clearing off no less than 3 minutes later.

Look. It’s not that I do not like you to come and visit, I do. I really do. I just wish you would go away sooner. You definitely out stay your welcome in my book after the month of January. Again, if we could work out some sort of deal this would be awesome.

Thanks for your time and I’m sorry if I offended you.

Jennifer Long 

Rain...You make life on the guard difficult!

Since I was a freshman in high school, I was a part of the MHS Marching Band spinning for their color guard. Now that I have graduated, for the past four months, I have been helping coach the group of girls that share the same passion of color guard that I have. Some of you may be asking yourself how does this have anything to do with nature. Well, let me give you a little insight into how the two relate.

         First off, guard season starts in the middle of July usually with some sort of basics camp. For me, I attended Michigan State's performing arts camp for four years. This means that for three days straight, I was out in the blazing sun practicing basics and learning routines for more than six hours a day. That is a lot of nature.

After basics camp comes a weeklong band camp at the high school in August. This year, for the first time, I was an instructor rather than a student at the camp. Again, because we as color guard can not throw our six foot flags in the air seven feet or so inside, we are forced to be outside in the elements for an entire week. On the one hand, that's a plus because if it is sunny all week you get a great tan. On the other hand, if it is raining and there is no lightning outside, you become wet and miserable and spinning a flag becomes way more difficult because the silk just absorbs the water. If you're lucky and there is no wind when it is raining, you avoid the wonderful silk whip marks that inevitably come with spinning a wet silk. This is the down side of nature and color guard for sure.

 After band camp comes a lot of Monday night rehearsals where the color guard and the band work together to make an awesome half time show to be performed at Friday night football games along with one major competition.

         On October 13^th, the Marshall High School marching band and surrounding schools in our district had their MSBOA marching band festival.  For my school in particular, all the hard work that we put in during the football season on the show is focused more or less on this one performance. At festival the band and color guard are judged by three different judges on stylistic, musical, and visual categories. The goal of every band that competes at festival is to receive a division 1 rating which is the highest and most prestigious rating that a band can receive at MSBOA competition. On the 13^th, it was raining. Now, from the information that was given earlier, one can safely say that I being one of the color guard instructors was very nervous to see how the competition was going to go. Wet silks make everything difficult. Just doing a simple move like a drop spin is difficult let alone a vertical “helicopter” toss above your head.

         Standing nervously on the sidelines as the band took the field, the skies lightened and the rain stopped. The color guard performed fantastically and had by far the best show of the season that night. Thanks to all the hard work, love, and dedication that the students and staff put into the show, the Marshall High School marching band received a division 1 rating this year. I am still so proud of the students, especially the girls on the color guard, and cannot wait to do it all again next season. 

Childhood Memories

Over the past week, we have been enjoying Tom Springer's book Looking for Hickories. In his book, one of his essays recalls a time when he was looking for fossils in his backyard. This essay specifically made me think of all the things that I experienced in nature as a child.  

Like Springer, my younger sister Lauren and I were convinced that dinosaurs had to be fossilized in our backyard, specifically in our turtle shaped sandbox. We would dig and dig and dig and dig and if we found a rock that somehow got buried in there, we would run it up to the house, interrupt my mom or dad with whatever they were doing and hassle them to tell us whether we had indeed found a dinosaur or not. Of course, in order to not shatter our hopes and dreams and have to spend the rest of the evening counseling my sister and I through the pain of learning dinosaurs were certainly not buried in our sandbox, my parents would always tell us with a big grin on their faces, yes. 

When I became a little older and grew out of the sandbox phase, a friend of mine from across the street and I started what we liked to call "the bunny hunters club". At our nightly meetings during the summer, we would set a "trap" in order to catch the bunny, which consisted of a cardboard box with a few baby carrots in it. We would then run up into my tree house and wait for a bunny to come along. We were never successful in actually "hunting" a bunny as we liked to call it, but we remained hopeful that one day we might actually get one. 

One last childhood memory that Springer's book made me remember was the planting of a blue spruce with my grandpa when I was around five years old at his home in Holland Michigan. At the time that we planted the tree, it was smaller than I was. He told me then that when I was older, that tree would be much taller than I was. I didn't believe him. To this day, whenever I go to visit my grandmother's house, I look into the backyard and see the giant blue spruce that we planted. He was right. That tree is much much taller than I am now. 

Kalamazoo Nature Center Experience

When I was a kindergartner, one of our first field trips was to the Kalamazoo Nature Center. I didn't remember a lot of that trip, but when I walked into the lobby of the Nature Center last week, I began to remember things. Now, to start, I remembered things being a whole lot bigger the last time I was there. I guess growing a foot or so makes a difference. 

To start this trip, we began by looking at the different exhibits inside the Nature Center main building. The first thing you have to do, of course, is to become bug sized. I remember when I was little being freaked out when I walked past the "magic mirrors" and watched myself getting smaller and smaller. This time, I laughed hysterically. Once bug sized, there are little areas to explore with the different animals that Michigan contains. Before this point, I really didn't realize all the different wildlife America's High Five State actually had. For me, seeing all these animals opened my eyes to how cool and diverse the state I call home is. 

After exploring the exhibits and listening to a short but interesting presentation, it was time to take a walk through the prairie the Nature Center has grown. This was a very neat experience in that I felt like I had traveled back in time to how Michigan used to look before the towns and cities sprung up. All of a sudden, a certain calmness fell over me and for the first time in a long time I lost all stress and was just able to enjoy being outside instead of being inside studying and stressing about the large amounts of work I have to do before the week is out. This experience in the prairie also made me realize how much I miss being able to go home at night, sit on my back porch and watch the sunset over the lake. That peacefulness is something that I never really treasured until now.

After the walk through the prairie, the group split up and a few of us took a hike down to the river. Here I noticed that the leaves had started changing colors. If this wasn't a wake up call to how I need to slow down, I don't know what else could be.

Fall used to be my favorite season. I loved going to football games, drinking apple cider, and raking leaves. One of my favorite scents to this day is the smell of burning leaves. But over the last few years, I have been so busy with school and other things that I haven't really had a chance to really enjoy fall. So, I made a decision right there on the trail to the river that this year I am going to enjoy fall the way I used to. 

After another hour or so at the Nature Center, it was time to go back to school and go back to the stressful life of a college student. But, after classes that day, I went out and bought a rake. I made a vow to myself that at least once a week I would go outside in my backyard for at least and hour this fall and rake leaves. This way I know that I can begin to truly enjoy fall the way that I used to.