A Frog's Life

Nature is a very big part of my life. Sometimes I feel like it is the only thing that can truly keep me sane and happy. Growing up in Miami, the ocean has always been there to calm and drown out my troubles. When I was choosing which colleges to go to one of my main criteria’s was how far the ocean is. I can not imagine not living right by the ocean because whenever I feel sick or had a bad day, a visit to the ocean is always the best remedy.
I see myself very much as an outdoorsy person because it is the place that I feel most at ease. There are no walls to keep me enclosed in a certain section of the world, confinements melt away and I can move freely through space. I love to be free and being outdoors enables me to embrace that completely.
“At the end of the island I noticed a small green frog. He was exactly half in and half out of the water, looking like a schematic diagram of an amphibian, and he didn’t jump (pg. 7).” This particular passage struck a chord within me because this summer I had a similar experience with a frog, and it made me think of my own experience in a different way. In my attempt to get closer to a frog, I slowly crept on my hands and knees, inching as silently as I could through the tall grass that adorned the edge of the pond. The frog seemed to have spotted me but remained perched on a rock that was sitting peacefully in the water. I found this peculiar because normally once I’d been sighted by an animal it would flee before I even processed the sighting myself. Yet, this frog remained on its rock. That is it did until I decided to minimize the four foot gap between us and (noisily might I add) rustle the ponds feathery grass in the process, causing my little amphibian friend to descend into the deep murky abyss. Dillard’s passage about the frog redefined nature for me because in her passage the frog that didn’t jump for her was not being un-frog like but was in fact being eaten alive, thus things in nature may not always be the way you perceive them. Had I perhaps looked a little closer at my seemingly fearless frog maybe I would’ve noticed a hurt limb or an ailment preventing him from reacting as quickly, then again perhaps the frog was simply observing me.