Lately, I have been reading Chinese poetry. There is a beautiful collection on Chinese-poems.com. The poems I read are naturalistic and would make Wordsworth himself take a deep breathe in awe. I find nature equally beautiful, but I find it challenging to write about it. I am not accustomed to seeing nature. Living in a desert and a city, nature lies only in the imagination. I come across more concrete buildings, flashing lights, and litter than I do plains, rivers, and forests. I feel like I have substituted artificiality for nature in my heart. For instance, each day I walk to school, I like to think of it as a little journey.

Yes, it’s time for a stream of consciousness.

From my apartment to the campus library, it is a forty minute walk. A lot can happen in forty minutes. Within the first five minutes, I walk past an empty lot that used to be an apartment complex. Pieces of colorful tile still lie stuck to the ground there. Tumbleweeds, pieces of glass, and other miscellaneous items from the past of where these people used to live lie abandoned on the dusty, dry dirt. I admire this empty lot because it reminds me of a deserted plain. A place people used to live and call home. It is odd walking past there because I wonder if denizens who used to live there make the same trace my steps do now.

I continue to walk and come across a flood channel. Since I was little girl, I have always lived by one. I love walking by the flood channel because it’s rare to see water in a desert. I always find it awe-inspiring to walk by one when it is raining outside. The flow of the channel goes from a slow moving and peaceful river to a raging, wild rapid. On most days, there are clear skies and ducks floating in the channel. I often think about going down there and feeding them, or eating them, depending whether or not I am hungry.

My last destination is at UNLV. I always admire the trees over by the Physics and Chemistry buildings. The trees are majestically tall and leafy. Recently, their leaves have been falling off and I walk by there at night and purposely step on them to hear the soft crunch noise under my feet. I feel like I am walking through a tiny forest or a few minutes.

Even though I live in the city, I still enjoy nature as much as anyone. I substitute an empty lot or a deserted plain, a flood channel as a river, and a small patch of trees as a forest. I may not be as imaginative as I was as a kid, but I still like to make comparisons in my head.

Back to Chinese poetry, you may be wondering why I have picked up an interest in this. (Other than the fact that I’m minoring in Chinese and plan on moving to Shanghai.) I like Chinese poetry because I want a Chinese tattoo. I want to combine my passion for Chinese writing and poetry. Someday, once I develop enough vocabulary and grammar skills in Chinese, I want to write my own Chinese poem following a similar structure and poetic format as they do. The first thing I learned is that their poems are based off nature. So, I have a lot to learn until I can write my own poem in Chinese, but it is definitely going to be a fun journey.