Hearing Myself Think

It's been about a month since I posted and a lot has happened. Nothing too special or life changing, but a lot has indeed happened. I took finals, which were an experience unlike any in high school. College finals mean a whole lot and you have to actually spend hours studying. I put in my time and was happy with the results, though, so that's that and there's nothing more to complain about. Then came Christmas break, and that was something else. It was pretty awesome to be back with my old friends, friends that I have dearly missed the past few months. We spent nearly every night together- something my parents were not particularly enthused about. But we had some amazing conversations and times just hanging out and watching movies. There is just this gap between college friends and high school friends that occurs most obviously because of the amount of time you've known them, but because your high school friends saw you through some pretty formative years. It's truly a comfort and a joy to be around them again.

And now I'm back at Luther. Starting J-Term. I'm taking a class called Walking Books, and so far am liking it very much. I think I picked a very engaged, but also very demanding class to be in. We will be reading four main books, as well as many other texts, walking every day, and journaling as well, all in three weeks. Plus of course papers, presentations, and tests. But the subject material is amazing- we are talking solely about walking. The history of walking, why we walk, what walking does for the soul, what it means to humans, and everything that relates to walking from camaraderie and whether compassion is a natural human characteristic to, pardon my language, "shitting in the woods." It should be awesome.

One of the requirements of the class is to walk at least 45 minutes a day. Yesterday a went out above Baker Village into the forest, and tramped about for about an hour and a half. Here is an entry from my journal if you so care to read. It's about the silence I felt:

After about a half-mile of clumsily stomping around deer scat and ducking under low-hanging branches I stopped and looked up. I couldn’t hear the road or the humming of the school heaters, nor the chatter of passing students. It’s been a while since the silence of nature, which really isn’t silence at all, just the sound of the earth living and breathing, which feels like silence to our battered ears, since the silence of nature has surrounded me and it took me a bit of time to adjust. Then I heard a song bird high above me to my right, the cawing and hooting of some crows beyond my view, and then I heard the wind. Or rather, I heard the cracking and straining of the few last dead leaves brushing against their trees. And I saw the lengthening shadows slice up the snow, and the barren gray-brown trees played tic-tac-toe against the sky, the pale-cold sky. My tri-color scene stood stark against the holiday season that has just passed by. The rich gaudy flavor of consumerism still lingers in my mouth and I feel disgusted by the cheap shit we buy and the cheap sentimentalism we cock down our throats. In the woods I left that and just stood still.

So that was my experience walking. I wrote a bit more about the sound of my boots, but that is a bit more rambling and mad.

Take it easy,

Danny