Abstract

The first essay I had to do was my Eco narrative essay. The objective of this essay was to write about my experiences with nature and my relationship with it. Who influenced my relationship with it like it was a teacher, parent, friend or online. This essay was informal, just pure writing about our opinions on the matter. For me, I remembered a drive that I went to and how it was an experience. For my revision process I targeted one experience instead of just different experiences like the drive I had, I added more details like “who was there” what did I see, how did it feel and how did the air feel.

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Beauty of nature

For me, it started with an early morning drive to City Island. I woke up at 6 a.m.
because I wanted to see the sunrise. I found a quiet spot by the water where the only sound was
the waves. When the sun came up, the whole sky turned pink for a minute. It was completely
peaceful. At that moment, I realized that to me, nature isn’t about big words or science projects.
It’s a feeling of solitude, a place where my busy brain can finally get quiet.
I remember back in elementary school, a teacher told us that trees give us oxygen. It sounded
crazy, like a superpower. But after that, we just moved on to the next lesson. We learned the
word “ecosystem,” but it was just a word to memorize for a test. It never felt real. It never made
me look at a tree in my neighborhood any differently. The language felt disconnected from my
actual life. The problems felt huge and far away, like the rainforest or polar ice caps, not
something in my own city.
My real lessons came from my own curiosity and, honestly, from my phone. One time, I was
scrolling on TikTok and saw a video of a perfect, snowy street. It was so calm and beautiful, with
this specific calming music in the background. It was the first time I thought, “I want to go there.
I want to see places like that.” It made me want to explore. I started looking up more videos of
nature in other countries and made a list of places I want to visit one day, like Japan and Canada.
I know it’s kind of ironic. I use my car to find peace and my phone to discover nature, even
though I know both those things can hurt the environment. That’s something I’m still figuring
out. I’m trying to be on my phone less and to just appreciate the nature that’s right here.
I never had a mentor to teach me about the environment. I taught myself by paying attention to
the moments that made me feel calm and amazed. I’m interested in this class because I want to
learn the real vocabulary for the things I already care about. I want to understand how to talk
about the ocean I like to look at, or the trees that I know are important, but never learned why in
a way that stuck. I have the feeling, and now I want to learn the words. The reason I took this
class is because I wanted to learn more about the world I live in. I might not have a lot of
opportunities now to go visit somewhere exotic like the Bahamas, but I hope by learning about
nature I can unlock my love for it. I want to learn the right words so I can teach others about it
and decide one day to be the change that I want to see in the world.