(let the process bring you alive)

I like going to or from campus best at the start and end of the day. Some mornings, when I bike to school, I get to cruise under the hanging arms of a row of palm trees, whose finger-like leaves glint in the slant of the early-day sun. As I pass by them, a Spanish-roofed building comes into view; beyond its gates, the ornate painted details of a church begin to show; and then I can see the golden hills beyond, and, above them, the blue sky, which here is almost always clear. On days when I walk, I take different routes, getting to know the architecture of this block and the flora of that one. A certain path leads me past a palm tree here while at the same time an old redwood there; another way tugs me through the arching stems of calla lilies as I admire roses stretching unfathomably upward across the street; others reveal the magenta of bougainvillea, the purple of a copper birch, and the deep blood red of a maple in such rapid succession it’s hard to remember that elsewhere the seasons don’t all happen at once. Elsewhere the golden leaves of a jacaranda won’t crunch beneath my feet as I traipse past a flowering magnolia, but they do here. In the evening, palm leaves imprint their silhouette on the graying sky as I head back home. The sky saturates with navy at its pinnacle, with yellow, orange, or pink along the westward horizon, and palm leaves imprint themselves on my brain as a chill sets in. The joys of fall and spring are rolled into one here; they feel magical in a new way here.

That I am living in an enchanting place is not new to me. The last time I commuted on foot was also when I was a student; then, too, I cherished the peaceful way I got from home to school, from relaxation to mental stimulation and back again. When I walk home at night here, my brain fills with visual memories of the paths I took through Cambridge in the evening. Most often I am walking through lightly falling snow; most often I am walking on a quiet city street, the brick sidewalks jostled and worn from hundreds of years of passing feet trodding upon them, the solemn museums and looming design school resting darkly and quietly at the close of day. I am walking past neighborhood houses; I am walking into the heart of the Square and toward my home; away from a street with a name like a metaphor—Divinity Ave, it’s called, and it’s where I spent much of my time in college. It’s a short block, housing a handful of buildings that hold within them a magnificent array of studies—East Asian studies; Russian studies; botany, with its massive herbarium; geology, paleontology, and archaeology, the latter with a warehouse full of artifacts from all over the world; the department of religion, with its walls embroidered with elephants, its yard bejeweled with large stone rhinos. I sometimes sat near those creatures just to enjoy the absurdity of them; and sometimes I wandered beyond them, the other side of that building offering a one-block-by-one-block stand of trees that I could walk amidst and almost fool myself into thinking was a forest, if I tuned out the sound of traffic, the glow of street lights, the smell of chimney fires at its edges.

It is important to me to live in places I love. There is something about the character of certain places that enlivens me. The satisfaction these places give me feels like the satisfaction of true love. You may think that sort of love is one-sided, but it isn’t; there is a vital dynamism to it. As I study the details of my surroundings and fall for them, there is a stirring of something inside me—an ignition of my internal fire. Love, it tells me, love what is around you; breathe deeply, discover, and savor; let the process bring you alive.