Life's many trials and trails is my thematic connection this year in my first semester English 12 class. This theme is inspired by my choice memoir, Lab Girl by Hope Jahren. Jahren is an acclaimed scientist, a botanist who studies trees, flowers, seeds and soil. She opens the book reminiscing about her childhood and the influence her childhood in rural Minnesota had on her. As a botanist, Jahren's work takes her into the "field" where she explores many different regions of the world and natural habitats of the beaten path or "trail" so to speak.
"We had been studying plants along the Mississippi River, traveling through Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana while trying to sample our way through an unbelievably lush gauntlet of poison ivy. Plants sweat while they photosynthesize, and our textbooks teach us that -like-us the hotter it gets, the more they sweat. ... We had done the field trip three times already, and my allergic reaction to the rampant poison ivy had gotten worse each time. Nonetheless, we kept anxiously wading through the waist-high fields of ivy in order to find the stubborn trees that we'd first sixed up on for sampling. I wouldn't and couldn't let the studya go."
(Jahrn 148-149)
Jahren has a humorous and fascinating way of bringing the science of soil and roots to life in her memoir. She is constantly running experiments, starting new labs, moving around the country. Jahren faces many trials in her life, but always seems to continue forward into a new season making the best of each situation. I've always had a deep sense of the profound power and mysteries of nature, but Jahren reveals just how alike, how fragile, how strong, how temperamental nature is, just like humanity. She demonstrates how scientific trials like life trials are the experiments we hopefully learn and grow from as we see what the data reveals.
"A cactus doesn't live in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn't killed it yet. Any plant you find growing tin the desert will grow a lot better if you take it out of the desert. The desert is like a lot of lousy neighborhoods: nobody living here can afford to move. Too little water, too much light, temperature too high: the desert has all of these inconveniences ratcheted up to their extremes. ..In the desert, life-threatening streesses are not a crisis; they are a normal feature of the life cycle. Extreme stress is part of the very landscape, not something a plant can avoid or ameliorate. Survival depends on the cactus's ability to tolerate deathly grim dry spells over and over again." (Jahren 142-143)
Taking inspiration from Jahren's book, my thematic connection is one to the importance of self-reflection give the "soil in which we are grown" our Lottery of Birth, and how the ability or inability to self-reflect and adapt can change the way we play the cards we are dealt. Furthermore, understanding the other players in the game can help to inform our choices and strategies.
The specific works from this semester that I created and I would like to connect to are "Time and Memory", "Wasteland Project", "Hometown: Then and Now" and "This I Believe" . To me, these works reflect the impact of my past, it's influence on my present, my choices, my beliefs and the way I hope to navigate my future. The research from this semester that I would like to connect to are Lab Girl, The Brain, Memory Hackers, Wasteland, Why Do I Need You, Secret Powers of Time, Lottery of Birth, Oxford Project, Rabbit Proof Fence, and How the States Got Their Shapes.
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