I hadn’t read a novel in years. Since before I married Talon. But yesterday I finished Where The Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens, and suddenly my whole body is full and empty at the same time. The eerily familiar feeling of something being ripped from my insides, a piece of me taken with the closing of the book, my soul forever entwined with that of the characters. My heart is so full with their beautiful love, the struggles of humanity and nature and life, and the happy-sad ending that is both so unlike anything I’ve ever read and so normal. I hadn’t forgotten what reading was like, but I had let the importance of that feeling slip away. I am so fulfilled by simply knowing the stories someone else wove, experiencing their words in a way that breaks from simply words and becomes something I can be immersed in. I’ve missed reading. Now I want to gobble up every book in my apartment (which is a lot). I can’t get the stories of Kya and Tate and the marsh out of my mind.
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I wrote the following as part of an assignment for my Environmental Biology course this semester. This is a topic that I am quite passionate about and could write about for days, but I only needed one page, and here it is. Part of my personal brand is hating cows. The initial reason for this is multifaceted and honestly a little embarrassing, but it has since evolved into a deep distaste for the cattle industry. After learning about the scope of related destruction to rainforests in a class in 2018, I even stopped eating beef for a year. My husband’s dairy allergy has limited the amount of “baby cow growth fluid” I consume. Of course I had to watch Cowspiracy the second I discovered its existence. It was an interesting documentary. For the most part I already knew the base facts, but I did learn a few things. For one, no environmental officials seemed to have expansive knowledge or interest in the topic of agricultural destruction. Unlike the documentarian, however, I don’t think this is part of a mass conspiracy. There may be an element of fear in the lackluster reactions—agribusiness is powerful, and as I also learned from the documentary, can be murderous in South America—but I think it has more to do with the fact that animal agriculture is so important. America—civilization in general—depends upon agriculture. Humanity depends upon agriculture. Environmental organizations and government agencies can afford to go after big oil because it is not a fundamental component of the human existence. We’ve only dealt with fossil fuels for a couple centuries. Agriculture has been around for millennia. This extends past the fact that all humans have to eat, and towards the fact that attacking agriculture attacks the everyman. There are no small family oil rigs. There are, always have been, and always will be, small family farms. Fighting the negative environmental effects of animal agriculture is not just hard to market and fundraise with, as said in the documentary, but also political and social suicide. As some of you may know, I am spending my fall semester on a study abroad to Paris. As a geography major, I can easily make excuses for this semester's academic importance, but the truth is that I just really wanted to go to Paris. I have been taking French classes for nearly seven years, and have been interested in the language, culture, and history for even longer. My major reason for coming to Paris, besides growing more confident in my language skills, is to surround myself in art of every form. Perhaps unfortunately, for me that begins with the Ancient Greeks. For class (it is a study abroad, after all) I have been instructed to write a series of blog posts on the actual art we have found around Paris. Last week we visited le Petit Palais, a free art museum just off the Champs-Élysées. Despite its name, le Petit Palais est très grand, and we had nowhere near enough time to see it all, instead focusing on areas key to the course. In addition to Byzantine icons and Northern Renaissance landscapes and still lifes, that meant Ancient Greek and Roman pottery. Last year was a year of powerful women. My network of feminine was loud and strong and full of driving energy. We were exploring our feminism through the firm knowledge that we could do it alone, together out of love and want but not necessarily out of necessity. It was a year of independence and autonomy and needing no one. We celebrated the women who spoke out, who held their heads high, who accomplished the large. We were validating and we were loving, but mostly we were strong. This year is a year of powerful women, too. But this is a softer power, one that celebrates the nurturing sides of the feminine. This year is about a mother and her new child, about the embrace between a girl and her grandmother in Moana, about grace and unconditional love. The fire has not gone out, but it is simply a warm, life-giving one now, not one that rages and destroys. This fire is about flowers and holding hands and quiet tears. It is about long nights discussing the intricacies of our deepest desires, about seeking the most good. It is about Rachel Hunt Steenblik’s Mother’s Milk, and seeking a connection with our Heavenly Mother. It is about finding the divine feminine in each of us, about embracing and unlocking our purest energies of love and acceptance and sisterhood. It is still brave and it is still strong, but it is also gentle. I'm a sucker for a good metaphor. When I was in early high school, I was surrounded by the kind of people who read simply for pleasure. They were, as the writer of my twelfth-grade English textbook would say, escapist readers. They propagated the idea that we shouldn't shred books down to their individual parts to find deeper meaning. The curtains are blue; the curtains are blue. Their crowning sentiment was that books say what they mean, and no more. And while I would still argue that my twelfth-grade English textbook writer was a pretentious prick, I'm quite proud that I've moved on from that crowd. Because although maybe when an author says that the curtains are blue they say that simply because why not blue, there is absolutely nothing wrong with also deciding that the blue means something to you. Because, as YA-giant John Green so often says, books belong to their readers. And this reader wants to think about things. She wants to take the world for more than just face value, she wants to dig deep and pull people apart into their component pieces and try to figure out what makes them tick. She is so deeply unsatisfied with so many people's answer to the question of "why?" because people never pull the truth out from inside them, explain the whole background and every bit of reason to it. They just go with the easy, even if they believe it's the hard. She's been told that science explains the how and religion the why, but "By relegating the things we fear and don’t understand to religion, and the things we understand and control to science, we rob science of its artistry and religion of its mutability." |
I'm Audrey, a college student and existential rambler.
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