an attempt to tip the scales.

some things don’t seem important anymore.

under quilts or in my car, i can touch the world and it’s real. the bait and hook of college classes doesn’t hold me anymore. i slip through my weekly schedule like i’m asleep, or like i’m in a waiting room. the next thing is always on my mind. i don’t think that’s a beautiful way to live, but it is inescapable. i am happiest when my time is own.

i want tangible things. i’m tired of papers and credentials. i want a down comforter, peppers on my kitchen counter, wool socks on my feet, books by my bed, laundry to do, even. i can’t care about wordsworth or coleridge or the marxist theory of literary criticism. world, do you hear me? there is snow on the ground in massachusetts and the teeniest of color on the trees here—i cannot focus on class.

the world is too big or too small (Dunn’s small: “hand-size, mouth-size”) for my feet to tread contentedly here.
isn’t that what God asks me to do?

i no longer feel like a college student.
am i not one?

there’s a moment—paddling far enough out on a lake, driving high enough on the side of a mountain—when the limitations of your previous perspective drops away, and you can see everything you couldn’t before. it happened to me this summer, on three mile lake in alaska. on a plain summer day, i caught my breath, realizing for the first time, that the place i had walked and slept for weeks was literally ringed by mountains. on the ground, i couldn’t see them.

i think in may i’ll see some mountains.