Sense of Place Field Trip Experience

Field Trip Experience


    For this "field trip", I decided to choose to be stillness and meditate outside of my house underneath my oak tree. Here I was able to capture a picture of where I meditated. I spent about 30 minutes outside sitting while the sun was setting just enjoying the quiet moment of nature. It was my first time meditating and I never realized how pleasant just sitting in silence is. During this meditation, I was able to observe a few things. 

One personal observation I was able to encounter during this meditation is my train of thought. My train of thought tends to be interrupted often by people, objects, smell, almost anything. But sitting in silence I was able to focus more and have a clearer thought without any distraction. In Robertson, it would be stated as vision. My vision was a lot more clearer during my meditation. "It is essential to create a clear vision of sustainability at the beginning of the planning process, a clear and compelling image of the future that defines what the organization is trying to achieve." (p. 300)

The second observation I encountered was resilience. I currently work at a hospital and as the spread of Covid 19 continues, it has taken a toll on my well being on top of much stress. As I meditated, I began to feel the weight of stress and negative thinking coming off slowly. Resilience connects with the reading on Sustainability Principles and Practice by Margaret Robertson. "Resilience, the capacity of an ecosystem to accommodate change while retaining its essential function, structure, and identity, is an emergent property of complex systems." (p. 118)

And lastly, the third observation I encountered was connectedness. In a quiet space as I was able to connect with nature by listening to the winds, the trees rattling, feeling the grass between my legs and the sun beaming on my skin. Robertson states that all life is made of connections. "The processes that make a living system only take place when the individual parts interact with together. It is a feature of all emergent systems of all life, that the whole is always greater than some of it's parts." (p. 39)





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