The Sauntering Eye

Abstract

our literally and figuratively. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she examines the tiny amoeba and a few minutes later looks up at the stars. In one ecosystem, she is a giant; in another she is a tiny speck of life. She teaches us to see so carefully even the minutest details in front of us, and then she shows us how the mind works, freed to examine, ponder, connect. It's all a matter of keeping my open, she says (18). With our eyes, we see relationships and perspectives. in relation to the universe. In nature, we see what is before our eyes, but we also see patterns and metaphors. Can you see the earth as a cell? Lewis Thomas does: I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go ... If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like?... it is most like a single cell (5). Last September a group of teachers at my school, a K-12 academy for girls, organized an interdisciplinary field trip for the ninth grade that was followed up in the classroom with related units in history, art, biology, English, and drama. Sixtythree students went on the trip to the Minisink Camp in Dover Plains, New York, accompanied by nine teachers. Students spent the first day working on ninth grade class dynamics, culminating in storytelling around a bonfire at night. second day was an interdisciplinary field day, which included workshops in Nature Writing, Nature Sketching, Creating a Culture, Patterns in Nature, and acting out some of the woods scenes from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Our focus was on seeing. At the beginning of the interdisciplinary field day, each student was given a field notebook, a beautiful blank sketchbook for drawing, writing, and thinking. On the cover, teachers created a logo, using the Egyptian hieroglyph of an eye and a quote from Marcel Proust: The real voyage of self discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes (O'Brien 181). For the ninth graders and their teachers, it was going to be a new landscape first, new later. We took our field notebooks in small groups and went out into the woods.