"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.