The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
~ Wendell Berry
My name is Zo and I have no idea why I am here.
Maybe it was a longing for change, a curiosity for something more, a dissatisfaction with college, or a need to run away. Maybe it was a rebellion of sorts, going against the normal, breaking out of the path I’d created for myself in my mind. I don’t really know what it was.
All I know is that I am here in the right place at the right time.
I am exactly where I belong.
Everything had to fall apart for me to fall into place. I think it started when my grandmother passed away over the summer. It wasn’t that I was necessarily close with her or anything, I think the grief and anxiety and worry just brought up every other feeling I had been trying to suppress: my fear of the uncertainty, my dissatisfaction with my education, my longing for something new. I had trapped myself into my “ideal” path: graduate high school, attend four years of college, figure the rest of it out by the time I graduate. Well, guess what? That wasn’t working for me. It was time to carve a new path, to break free. But first, I had to break down.
The gist of it was that I was entirely not excited for another year of school on campus. I didn’t have a community there that I was content with, I was feeling unmotivated in my studies, and to top it all off, I had an ex-partner there that I was longing to rid from my life for good. All of the signs were clearly telling me that campus was not a place I needed to be this year. My heart had other plans.
It longed to join the Immersion.
What’s the Immersion? A year-long wilderness program immersing adult students into nature, community, and themselves.
Why was I drawn to it? Again, no idea. But my heart screamed at me this summer: “Zoe, this is all you want to be doing. This is where you need to be.”
Unfortunately for my heart, there was a waitlist for the program, which my brain automatically associated with a 0% chance of me getting in. Along with this, a close friend and I were neck deep in the process of finding an apartment for the upcoming school year, and it felt wrong to back out a month before we were hoping to move in.
Cue the next breakdown.
Finding housing together didn’t work for a number of reasons, and I’ll admit, a lot of them were my fault. I think my disinterest in being on campus this year highly impacted my willingness to find an apartment; I only wanted the cheapest housing option (cheap = I’m not wasting as much money to live off campus in a place I really don’t want to live in to begin with). Our priorities were way off. And so, after many weeks of frustration, my friend dumped me as their roommate. And even though it was secretly what I had wanted all along, I didn’t take it well at all.
That’s when I joined the waitlist.
I thought, “Fuck it! I have absolutely nothing to lose.” On-campus housing was full, there was no way I was paying over $1000 for a 1 bedroom place. At this rate, I would be living at home for a while either way. So I clumsily filled out the application and sent it in mere hours after my friend had dumped me.
I had absolutely nothing to lose and I still gained everything I had ever wanted.
Here I am, a whirlwind of a life change away, still recovering from the whiplash but happier than I have ever been.
I am exactly where I belong.
I am exactly where I belong.
But why?