My relationship with nature

I would prefer to see myself in nature more than in a city life environment. However, over the years when spending time in nature, I have found myself wanting to call a friend and share the experience, or have felt the urge to snap a picture to show my family. Although the modern world can play an impact on the way I experience nature, it is a small impact, because nothing can change the joy I feel from being in nature. Hiking the Appalachian Trail and taking backpacking trips out to the Midwest was my thing for years in middle school all the way up to high school. Although hiking and backpacking never became tedious, I had always wanted to know about other ways to explore nature. When my dad and I got SCUBA certified, an entirely new world opened up. On page 10, Dillard talks about seeing sharks off the Atlantic coast of Florida and uses the most incredible sentence to describe the experience, “The sight held awesome wonders: power and beauty, grace tangled in a rapture of violence.” This is a helpful description of how I feel when SCUBA diving. When you watch The Discovery Channel’s ‘Shark Week’ or when you hear about shark attacks on the beach, most people hope never to run into these animals. I too, had been overwhelmed with the thought of seeing a shark. However, on a trip to the Cayman Islands with my dad, I experienced exactly what Dillard describes. The white tip reef shark, although fully capable of becoming violent, had a powerful yet peaceful and beautiful way of gliding through the water. When I read the quote it immediately reminded me of this experience. Dillard does a fantastic job of perfectly setting up the imagery to describe the scene and the describes perfectly the emotions you feel when you see these beautiful animals.