Nature Is Misrepresented In Disney Films

For this week's blog assignment, our professor asked us to observe nature for twenty minutes. At first I was slightly horrified by the idea of having to sit somewhere for 20 minutes and just observe nature. I really enjoy nature and I love mediating, but this assignment required me to do different things. I had to pay keen attention to the little critters in the area around me. As much as I do enjoy animals, I find myself less interested in insects.\

 To conduct my observation I decided to go to the park nearby my house. Unfortunately for the little critters, this park is right next to an elementary school and the park was littered with unruly little children. I chose to sit under a tree which gave me a good view of the rest of the park. I could see children playing soccer and shouting in Spanish at each other. There was a women with two little children playing on a slide. I closed my eyes and tried to clear my mind of all thoughts. When I opened them, I looked around and felt extremely disappointed. Having grow up on Disney movies, I expected all forms of nature to slowly but surely crawl their way up to me. Seeing how sweet and peaceful I seemed, I thought surely something might be around for me to observe. To my great dismay, I saw nothing!

Nothing was what I saw for majority of the time I sat there. Children shouted,an ice cream truck went by, a few joggers, some people and their dogs.

I went home comtemplating how I'd explain that little critters just don't seem to want to appear in front of me. I walked into the backyard to take the trash out. Dropping the bag of trash, I chased our Siamese flame point cat, Vaska, into our small and humble herb garden.

Nature came alive.

I shrieked random phrases in Chinese at him(Vaska), and he climbed up our stonewall and jumped into the neighbor's yard.

In our garden, tucked deeply in the dirt were earthworms like the one found in this picture below.

There was some cute little ladybugs on the petals of some small little rose looking plant that we have behind our garden.

In that same area with the rose little flowers there is a huge bush that has strong branches. A small red looking berry grows on it and inside the huge bush are tons of SPIDERS! Sometimes if I am chopping away the branches the spiders come crawling out!EWK! In our other smaller bushes against our stonewall are temporary homes to large grasshoppers. Tan and green colored ones sometimes hop/fly from bush to bush.

I was very sad not to have seen much while I was in the park for twenty minutes, but I felt like my garden/backyard was a better environment to observe nature. I'm glad I was able to see a few critters here and there.