Lawn Between Marks and Fertitta
by Gary Zhang
Doing the outdoor journal assignment for my writ150 class this semester has slowed me down. It made me notice what has been around me all along during my year at USC. Nature does not disappear in cities; it just gets ignored. This is the quiet paradox of the environmental moment we live in: climate change dominates headlines and dinner-table arguments, yet most people treat the natural world as a backdrop rather than something worth paying attention to. Concern, it turns out, is not the same as attention.
February 8, 2026. For my first outdoor journal entry, I did not think too much about where to go. I just chose the lawn between Marks and Fertitta since it was convenient on the way back from the gym. The goal was simple: finish the assignment. The idea of “connecting with nature” felt a little foolish. How can you connect with something that isn’t even paying attention to you? So I sat down, staring at the sky. After a minute, I glanced down, and a black lizard stared back at me sideways, perfectly still.
February 28, 2026. I was sitting on the lawn again. The grass felt dry beneath me, and the heat was intense. I could feel the sun burning my skin, and I began to sweat. However, every few moments, the wind would come through, flicker the branches, and cool me down. The sky was blue, no clouds. I could smell the dry grass around me. When I closed my eyes for a moment, I felt like I was in a forest, but the heat reminded me exactly where I was. My body was uncomfortable, but at some point, something shifted. I stopped thinking about the assignments, and the pressure started to fade.
At this point, I still would not say that I was doing the journals because I wanted to, but something had quietly shifted. I didn’t have a word for it yet.
I didn’t do another journal until spring break. I found myself heading back to the lawn again, but this time, I just wanted to sit outside.
March 18, 2026. It’s spring break, and most students have left campus. From where I’m sitting, I can only see three lights turned on inside of Marks, which makes everything feel almost empty. I noticed that the sunset is later now due to daylight saving time. The sun was setting, casting a golden glow across the sky, while the sky above me remained blue. The ground beneath me still radiated heat from the day; most of the flowers around the lawn were blooming, pink ones that I was certain had not been there a few weeks earlier. Spring had quietly arrived while I wasn’t paying attention. I stayed out after sunset.
By spring break, I was looking.
For the next few days, I kept going back.
March 21, 2026. I had closed my eyes for fifteen minutes and wrote: I noticed my other senses grow stronger once I closed my eyes. I feel the wind passing my legs and sometimes my face. But something was different: I was no longer waiting to go back inside.
By April, I had stopped thinking of these sessions as assignments at all. On April 6th, sitting outside after lunch with a midterm the next day, I found myself thinking not about the exam but the situation between the United States and Iran, the uncertainty that anything could happen tomorrow. And then I wrote: “So just focus on the present.” It was the same thing the lawn had been teaching me all semester, just in different words.
On April 13th, I looked up at the sky and wrote that it looked like a painting. In February, I had sat under the same sky and felt nothing.
My last entry was April 14th. It had been a rough week — my laptop broke, I mixed up a test date, and I was exhausted. I went outside anyway. Sitting there, I wrote that I had found it to be “a good way to calm myself down and connect with nature.” It was a simple sentence, maybe even an obvious one. But I thought about what I had written on February 8th— that the idea of connecting with nature felt foolish, that you cannot connect with something that isn’t paying attention to you.
I completed all the required entries, but staying outside and connecting with nature had become more than an assignment. It had become a routine, and a way for me to release my pressure and return to the present. My own worries are so small compared to everything else that is quietly alive around us.
This afternoon, the flowers behind Marks are not just pink anymore; there are yellow, red, and white ones too, more than I had ever noticed before. Nature does not ask to be appreciated. It just continues when no one is watching. The abundance was always there. I just needed eleven weeks, a class assignment, and one black lizard to finally see it.