Walking, City Lights, & Tree Spirits

Walking, City Lights and Tree Spirits

by Sara Brodsky

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Contents Foreword

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Photo essay

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Poems

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All photos by Sara Brodsky 3

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Foreword Excerpt from Walking by Henry David Thoreau "I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil--to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks--who had a genius, so to speak, for SAUNTERING, which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a HolyLander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering."

A while ago, my dad gifted me this book. I picked it up one day last Spring over quarantine and I got lost within its world, mostly because of how deeply connected I felt to its premise- walking. I had spent so many days inside because of this global pandemic. The only thing that kept me sane throughout all those months was walking. I walked along the pier, I walked to different parks, I walked through empty neighborhoods and all around the city. When I lived in DC, I walked in forests and trails, getting lost inside of the green magic within. This year, I decided to seek out the forests in the city.

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Having been raised among the greenery of DC, I have always felt close to nature. This project is an ode to walking, wandering and sauntering about the world. Sharing these experiences allows me to pass down a feminine energy of love and yearning and growing up -- one that I feel is so magical I sometimes want to grasp onto it forever. Inspired

by Thoreau and ecofeminist poets, I went about a journey of exploring NYC through its nature. This book is a photo essay of my days spent walking in Central Park, Prospect Park, and Tompkins Square Park with my film camera.

Other days I spent meditating, reading, journaling, and creating art. I used the juxtaposition of the natural landscapes next to the grittier city photos to show the differences between the two settings that surround us in NYC. Many of the images share a common theme of questioning what is natural. I found humanness can be the source of this naturalness, and so I incorporated human bodies and movement in my images.

Dedicated to all the saunterers, wanderers and walkers of the world.

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breaklight

by Lucille Clifton, 1974 light keeps on breaking. i keep knowing the language of other nations. i keep hearing tree talk water words and i keep knowing what they mean. and light just keeps on breaking. last night the fears of my mother came knocking and when i opened the door they tried to explain themselves and i understood everything they said.

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Excerpt from Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, by Susan Griffin He says that woman speaks with nature. That she hears voices from under the earth. That wind blows in her ears and trees whisper to her this world, that he was set on this world as a stranger. He sets himself apart from woman and nature. And so it is Goldilocks who goes to t to the birds, Cinderella with mice as her allies, the Mermaid who is half fish, Thumbelina courted by a mole. (And when we hear in the Na surprised. We had thought only little girls spoke with animals.) We are the bird's eggs. Bird's eggs, flowers, butterflies, rabbits, cows, sheep elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature. A

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r. That the dead sing through her mouth and the cries of infants are clear to her. But for him this dialogue is over. He says he is not part of the home of the three bears, Little Red Riding Hood who converses with the wolf, Dorothy who befriends a lion, Snow White who talks avaho chant of the mountain that a grown man sits and smokes with bears and follows directions given to him by squirrels, we are p; we are caterpillars; we are leaves of ivy and sprigs of wallflower. We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, And he says he cannot hear us speak. But we hear.

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excerpt from Cross Creek (1942)

by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings The jungle hammock breathed. Life went through the moss-hung forest, the swamp, the cypresses, through the wild sow and her young, through me, in its continuous chain. We were all one with the silent pulsing. This was the thing that was important, the cycle of life, with birth and death merging one into the other in an imperceptible twilight and an insubstantial dawn. The universe breathed, and the world inside it breathed the same breath. This was the cosmic life, with suns and moons to make it lovely. It was important only to keep close enough to the pulse to feel its rhythm, to be comforted by its steadiness, to know that Life is vital, and one's own minute living a torn fragment of the larger cloth.

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Excerpt from Walking

by Henry David Thoreau We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return-- prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again--if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man--then you are ready for a walk.

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