What the Leaves Taught Me

by Sam Voter
September 29

A few weeks ago I was sitting by the lake doing a sit spot, a important component of our class “Knowing Nature” taught by the program director Jacob McCoola. As Jake makes clear, this class will not show us what nature is, rather, it is meant to further an understanding of nature on both a personal and systemic level.  We might not draw any conclusions from tis class, but it is meant to plant a seed in our minds that will grow throughout our lives.  Sit spots are individual time we take to be still and observe nature, to hear and see things we would not normally.  They are important in furthering our personal connections to nature.  We can take as much or as little from them as we please.

This particular sit spot was a sunny afternoon with a slight breeze.  The sunlight was bouncing off the ripples in the water and projecting onto the overhanging leaves.  They looked alive.  A beautiful mosaic of light and shadow made the leaves look as fluid as the water itself.  It was beautiful, but then something changed in me.  I suddenly became self-aware, and the leaves began to look dull and meaningless.

I knew coming into this semester that I wanted to prioritize personal growth.  This was what brought me here.  Among many things, I wanted to change how I see the world.  I have always found beauty in simplicity, but where that beauty came from and what it meant I did not know.  I wanted to understand beauty.  Having no idea how to achieve this, something inside me knew change would come. 

Self-awareness is something I have always struggled with.  I believed it took away from authentic experience, whatever it may be, so long as I am aware of myself perceiving it.  It took away from the authenticity and spontaneity of life.  Beauty to me has always been in everything to ever exist, simple or complex.  To find it, I thought it was necessary to remove myself from whatever I was perceiving, to see life for its objective truth and nothing more.

I was angry for being aware of myself looking at those leaves.  How could I experience their true beauty and authenticity through the hazy lens of my consciousness?  Like I have always done in the post, I tried to ignore my self-awareness.  This has never worked, ad soon I became aware of myself ignoring myself perceiving the leaves, starting a cruel feedback loop of self-awareness.  I was fed up and tired of this.  Nothing I seemed to do could separate myself from what I perceived.  With nowhere to run from myself, lacking the normal technological distractions I would normally have, I sat and thought.

I have spent so many years of my life running from myself, from my self-awareness.  This semester forces you to be with your thoughts, so being forced to think I decided I might as well just accept it and what happens.  Clearly ignoring it has not worked, so what do I have to lose in embracing it? I forced myself to perceive those leaves.

This past summer my friend told me about a branch of philosophy called dialectism.  To my understanding, this way of thought seeks to find truth for the universe in contradiction.  It separates truth or beauty, into two categories: subject and substance.  Subject is what something is.  The pen I am writing this with is a pen, nothing too abstract.  The substance of this pen its meaning; how I perceive it and what I take away from it.  Both subject and substance hold truth.  The difference is that substance holds a truth.  It is on a personal basis; therefor, no two people can see the same substance. This creates a contradiction in what everyone perceives to be the essence of something.  Truth is personal and different for everyone; therefore, the only truth is that there is no one truth: truth in contradiction.  It’s a cool way of seeing the world, I thought, but I did not know how to practice it.  It was an afterthought, until that day I was sitting by the lake.

When I embraced my self-awareness, I felt something change inside of me.  The leaves’ beauty came back.  Accepting myself as a being of consciousness capable of perception let me see and feel the bigger picture of life, beauty and nature.  I saw myself from a third-person perspective, revealing to me that I am in no way separate from the leaves, or anything else around me.  I was there, present and a pat of all the natural systems around me.  I felt the warmth and belonging of nature’s systems as I zoomed out to see that I am one with them.  The leaves came to life, taking my hand and revealing to me this incredible sense of belonging and embrace.  It was my consciousness that gave life to those leaves and everything around me.  I understood them as they understood me because they were me, and all of this was coming from me:  the beauty, the belonging, the understanding, all from me.  A blanket of self-love and empowerment fell upon me.

Maybe this is what Jake was getting at with this class.  Nature is us.  It is tapping into the collective consciousness of the living and non-loving that connects us not only to it, but to ourselves.

I realized that it was the substance of the leaves I was reacting to, their subjective truth, my truth.  All those years of ignoring the essence of life mace so much sense.  I was trying to subconsciously ignore substance and replace it with subject.  Finally seeing it felt so natural.  There is more to life than face value.  Only by projecting myself onto the leaves could I see their true beauty.  It could only have come from myself and no one could tell me that I was wrong simply because it came from myself.  Those leaves taught me that beauty comes from within, and from there we begin to understand nature. 

I feel so much closer to understanding what beauty is.  It is simplicity, complexity, and everything in between.  It is nature, our beauty from within, the gift of consciousness, projecting onto the world.  I see the world differently now, though I still have much to learn in understanding my relation to their world.  A seed has been planted in my mind, and growing season is fast approaching.

Change comes naturally; all you must do is create space for it.  Arcadia is that space, free of distractions.  Where you are not reminded of mundane modern life, where you are free to think and to feel as you please, free to be as much or as little as you want.  Where you are free to simply be.