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Chapter 2. Learning Nature Through the Senses
- University of Nevada Press
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College students are desperate for sensation. Through the news, we hear some of what they choose to do in their free time: dance to pulsing rhythms, create art, climb mountain peaks, get drunk, run whitewater, travel to sunny Mexico, try psychedelics, explore each other’s bodies, taste intense new cuisines from other cultures, play body-bruising sports, wear exotic fragrances, color hair with strange hues, and drive really fast. I, Susan, remember dressing exotically, eating organic foods, and exploring the duende of deep flamenco passion, playing the guitar on hilltops on moonful nights. College and university students’ preoccupation with sensuality is no accident. Our senses are a direct biological means to understanding the world around us and our relationship with other beings. Living in the sensual is a desperate search to know the self by knowing our animal nature. Students, like the rest of us, evolved as explorers, inquisitive pokers, and hunters. Some students, often the more intelligent ones, are the most reckless in their experimentation. And each year we lose a few, c h a p t e r 2 Learning Nature Through the Senses s u s a n z w i n g e r a n d a n n z w i n g e r s u s a n z w i n g e r a n d a n n z w i n g e r 2 1 usually male, to extreme sensory exploration combined with naiveté, the result of a nature-less upbringing. Our classrooms not only deny the original cave and forest but work to create the most efficient, rational populace in the world. Indeed, Western culture, including college curricula, attempts to obscure our evolutionary dependence on our immediate senses. But understanding nature’s complexity requires that we relearn how to use not just the five main senses but also the more than fifty-seven others, senses that animals use and that remain available to us as well. The edge of our consciousness marks both the edge of our sense perception and the edge of our knowledge about the places around us. College curricula treated my brain’s corpus callosum like a brick wall. Looking back on my own experience as a college student, I realized that I evolved Janus-like, with two faces and two separate life experiences. On one side, my intellect was greatly stimulated by literature, philosophy, and art history classes. I loved such classes, and my mind thrived. With the other side, I was mountain-climbing, backpacking, running whitewater, and painting nature. This thriving, sensory, active side seldom crossed over to my academic side, except when poetry flashed an accidental fusion. In 1969, my senior year at Cornell College, many of us read Edward Abbey’s just published Desert Solitaire and experienced spontaneous combustion, as young people continue to do upon reading Abbey. Ten of us piled in an old station wagon and drove all day and all night to Canyonlands, a newly created national park. In one of the wondrously synchronistic phenomena of my lifetime, when I was twenty-one I met an unusual young man from Ohio; his [34.204.181.19] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:47 GMT) 2 2 t e a c h i n g i n p l a c e name was Gary, and he had just entered Cornell College as a freshman at the age of seventeen, a year younger than most freshmen. His experience with nature up to that time consisted of wildflower paintings and good poems about midwestern hills and forests. He had never been out West. We naturally included him in our group of novice and experienced backpackers. What a life-changing trip we had. Because the park was brand-new, trails had not yet been properly signed, archaeological treasures lay out in the sun, and water sources were not marked on maps. We backpacked for ten days in total wilderness in the as yet unscathed and untrekked Canyonlands. Five days out in the backcountry, we got lost, ran out of water, patched up blisters, got confused, and scared ourselves silly with stories around a campfire. A sudden storm dropped two feet of snow, promising an end to our water problem. After melting snow for a couple of hours, I hiked up a high ridge alone and came face-to-face with a female mountain lion. We found ancient Anasazi treasures piled near cave sites (we left them in place) and...