(reflection after giving college advice to a high school junior)

Sometimes it can be hard to keep your mind from retreating: back to that time before anything was settled: that time when you were still deciding which way to step next. I can still see the images that filled my brain back then, see the myself of those years in the visual memories that glow brightly so many years later. So many images from those days are framed by tree branches -- my school embedded in 180 acres of mostly forest; my house encircled by evergreens and hardwoods; my weekends often unfolding in woods. Once a friend asked where I was applying to college, and what I remember more than my answer is the purple hue of the night sky behind the silhouettes of pine trees looming above us. Thousands of time I lay in my bed at night or through the morning and constructed my contemplations while watching the stars sparkle through the tree branches outside, the leaves rustle atop them, or a bird perch in their midst. I did my best daydreaming in the hammock at my grandparents' house, the feathery soft fishbone of each honey locust branch resting against the blue of the sky like dried leaves pressed onto construction paper. I said goodbye to the south from the front seat of a van trundling slowly down Pigeon Mountain, a good few months before leaving; it was April and the yellow of spring was warm all around me; the leaves were fresh and shaking gently in the warm breeze as though quietly applauding me. A year earlier, as I'd said goodbye to New England seated below pine needles, a flock of geese unsubmerged itself from bay waters in an instant of disturbinglingly loud wing clatter. A decade earlier I'd said my first and only prayer of this lifetime; lost deep in the woods behind summer camp, I'd known no other way to calm myself down. So many pinnacle moments of my life back then were surrounded by forestry. I felt no doubt that I'd always continue my romance with nature, my spiritual bond with what blossoms all around us.

I remember that me but don't feel that I still am her. I thought I would be for life, but you go to a college and then you find a profession and things unfold in such a way that segments of your existence feel disjointed. I wonder, sometimes, if I'd gone to a liberal arts college out in the woods if I'd be doing things the old way now, if I'd still go hiking and camping and know how to light camp stoves and pitch tarps in any setting. I miss that me that found such exaltation in simple things. It's so easy to retreat back to those memories, to bemoan the loss of the realities behind them. Yet it is enriching to discover other existences, to come to know them deeply as well. It is invigorating in its own right to explore worlds unknown to me: to intermix the loves of my past with the heartfelt investigations of the present.