Gaze down onto the reddish earth, with clay beads escaping onto the broken shard of old glass as it freezes one tiny image: a purple flower pedal pressed in its death into a white lily of the valley bell. And for a moment, all that exists of the natural world is this one image: precious, ephemeral, dead. Will preserved images someday be all that remain of our vibrant nature?

Vidoczki were my first introduction to the natural world. The creation of vidoczki was a common childhood past-time in Communist Poland, consisting of finding a broken piece of glass (simple task in a post-war city) and a natural object (usually a plant), then pressing the glass over the natural object to form an image in the soil.

As a young child, my first contact with nature was in a large sandbox filled with remnants of seashells and broken glass, shaded by a leaning willow. Sand was brought in straight from the beach so it contained a range of treasures awaiting discovery. I lived in a world where people stood in lines for days to purchase a small chuck of chocolate, and in later years, to purchase flour and milk. Few worried about what accompanied the sand in children’s sandboxes. When we lack food, other things become far less important.

But I didn’t worry about food. I played. I loved how by pressing one item under glass, so that it was frozen, unmoving; its beauty emerged for me. I could sit and look down at the greenish glass image of a now-dead flower, and somehow that flower was more beautiful in its death than it had been in its life. I began to appreciate it more in its death. I would pick petals off vibrant plants, not conscious of my role as a murderess, and press them under glass. I’d admire my handiwork. My talent increased as I began to mix colors and textures, pressing in a yellow sunflower petal with purple lavender. I liked my natural world to be frozen in place and dead. I didn’t have to worry about it hurting me.

I stopped making vidoczki when I moved to Nigeria. I didn’t have the nerve to kill the natural world there. The Polish natural world seemed to be there for my taking, already broken and dying. Yet Nigerian land was fecund, breathing, screaming, vehemently growing. I would throw a stick into the earth and it would grow. I wasn’t brave enough to take on that type of earth, with its scorpions and pulse. I used my window instead as the glass, and would spend hours looking out into a natural world that still fluttered with hairy moths and vines that crawled into my window. The natural world found me, the tiny murderess who no longer even wanted to squish one ant of the million that crawled in the open window one day. No, here, in Nigeria, I became one with the earth. The red dust of the Harmattan blew into my lungs and settled. One day, I was no longer an outsider to the earth; I was one of the earth. Instead of feeling like I had the power to murder as I wanted, I instead craved being enveloped into the pulsating life-force. I don’t remember the day it happened, but somehow I sank into the earth.

And today, as an environmental scientist, I feel like I’m holding up a broken piece of glass anywhere I look. Oh we need those scientists to study and document and analyze, but if we want people to really awaken, then we need to reach into their earthen soul. If we want people to care about this planet that we sit on, lean on, spit on; then we need to help them actually realize that we are sitting, leaning, and spitting on a planet that is a part of ourselves. Our planet has a heartbeat, has a breath – and if you take the time to listen, you too will hear it. You’ll hear how the pulse is skipping a beat or two, how some breaths are labored. What will you do? Will you simply make vidoczki and appreciate her in her death? Or will you try to let her leak into your soul?