My Natural History

I had my first encounter with the tenuousness of life when I was seven, and was playing in my front yard as my mother watched over me. I ended up yanking a handful of flowers out of the ground to give to my mother, and while she was grateful for my act of kindness, she explained that I had inadvertently killed the plants. At that point, I burst into tears; I had no idea that such a small action could have such profound consequences on another life form. To comfort me, my mother placed the uprooted plants in a vase filled with water to prolong their life. To comfort myself, I promised never ever again to be so careless with the fragile life around me. This silly, yet profound experience helped me appreciate how complex nature can be for years to come. 

Despite this encounter, until recently, I had a limited amount of interest in nature, and exposure to it. The little I knew came from the minimal amount of diversity provided by my apartment complex courtyard, which was full of concrete, and a handful of family hikes. Yet these meetings made a significant impact on me, even if I did not realize it at the time. In the least, it gave me a foundation for appreciating how beautiful and complex nature was, even if I did not fully comprehend it at the time. As I grew older, I grudgingly participated in a number of nature oriented activities, mostly because I had to do community service in high school. For a while I volunteered at the Seattle Aquarium, mostly standing by the exhibits and helping people identify species in the tanks. Ironically, most people don't want help when it came to fish; they want to discover it for themselves.

 Later in my high school experience, I spent a week camping out on Rattlesnake Ridge doing trail restoration work. That particular trip was far more influential because it demonstrated how nice it was to remove one's self from society at large and all the urbanization that I was familiar with. In fact, I thought I would be ecstatic about coming back into Seattle proper and returning to my former ways, but they turned out to be far less satisfying than I thought they would be. 

More recently, I have taken a huge interest in natural history, particularly when it comes to plants and birds. I'm not entirely sure what drove this recent interest. It might be that for quite a while, I was a music major, and I was seeking to ground myself in something that was very tangible (in contrast to the abstractness of music). Either way, I began to actually take note of my surroundings again, and realized that I couldn't identify the flora and fauna surrounding me, and that I had no comprehension of the biodiversity around me. So I sought to change that. I started humiliatingly simple; just distinguishing trees from shrubs from herbaceous plants. But I found that the more I learned, the more I wanted to learn because it was fascinating! And so here I am, trying to learn more about plants and birds.