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One recurring theme that I noticed running through this week's posts was the idea of having some kind of emotional, and perhaps also spiritual, connection to a place or places.

RobertFrostyTheSnowman's launch post mentioned how Terry Tempest Williams maintains the personal connections that she feels to the places discussed in Refuge despite the fact that many of those places are threatened by human activity. (For example, the burrowing owls' home that she visited is destroyed so a building can be constructed, and nuclear testing has harmed her family's and ancestors' home in the Nevada desert by making it unsafe.) This post raised the question of whether or not the connections formed between human beings and the natural world can be severed. The response that foxycat95 offered focused on the fact that the meaning(s) that we ascribe to these places persist, making it difficult, if not impossible, to entirely sever those connections.

Krystoferrobbyn's launch post also dealt with the idea of connection, in this case by focusing on a specific quote from Refuge that links the idea to the concept of a spirit world. In this portion of the essay, Tempest Williams describes how she was raised to believe that every individual has "a place and a purpose" (747). Krystoferrobbyn offered a series of questions that have to do with this belief, asking us to contemplate why we are drawn to and feel a connection with certain places. Though everyone who responded expressed a different opinion on the spiritual aspect of the question, most commenters essentially agreed that not only do the places with which we connect say something about who we are, but they also play a role in shaping who we become.

Though the other two launch posts didn't address the idea of connection as overtly as these two did, it still seems to be implicit in their concerns. These posts were more concerned with how we can channel the emotions that we feel in relation to places that are important to us into actions that will bring about positive change for the environment. Those emotions, it seems, arise because of that feeling of connection.

Overall, I think it makes sense that our class seemed interested in the idea of connection in relation to this reading. It obviously plays an important role in the text itself - Tempest Williams essentially explores how her connection to the places that have been important to her throughout her life have impacted her - but I think the idea of connection is also significant to us as writers. I would imagine that we would all agree that having some kind of connection to our subject matter is important to our writing. Additionally, TheBirdSpeak's post ties this into concerns raised by this course in particular by specifically questioning how we can convert the emotions that we feel for places into writing that will benefit nature.