Another beautiful day in Newark brings another exciting walk into White Clay. I’m more than ever appreciating the weekly opportunity to immense myself in nature because this past week has taken a toll on me. Four tests, a cracked computer screen, and a broken phone later and I was ready to pull my hair out. I knew going into the woods would have a calming affect, or so I hoped.

I left the dorm feeling rather melancholy and as if nothing at that moment could fix all of the bad things that were going on in my life. I knew things weren’t going too well for the past couple of months but finally it seemed I had enough and everything became too much. I yearned for a familiar face of a family member, my boyfriend who had just visited, or a high school friend that could comfort me no matter how tough the time. There was no option of any of those people popping up to see me so my familiar place in woods was the only refuge I could find.

I propped myself up against a tree as I positioned myself in between its roots that were showing through the earth. I took some time just closing my eyes and breathing in slowly, lowering my heart rate and attempting to quiet my mind. Instead, however, I began to think about how upset I was that I had missed the class about how to meditate. I know there are actual processes of how to meditate, but for several years now I feel that quite often throughout the day I took the time to quiet my mind, self-reflect, and just… feel. Is that meditation? I guess it could be right? I guess it could be anything that tries to quiet or get in contact with the mind to be in tune with oneself. I never have a process for it; I just do it. Learning a couple methods to do it, however, has always been something I’ve been interested in. My mind quickly snapped back to reality after my mind drifted for some time.

Instead of keeping my eyes closed and feeling from the inside, which I normally decide to do when I’m in the woods, I decided to try to feel from the outside. After reading the first few chapters of The Forest Unseen, I decided I’d try to give it a go on documenting my surroundings rather than just my feelings. I started with the earth I was sitting on. I touched it, stuck my fingers in it, and picked it up to mold in between my fingers. It was damp and colder than the air around me. It was quite overpowering to think that dirt, similar to this but very, very different at the same time, covered the Earth in places the ocean didn’t. Of course there were places with exceptions, deserts, anywhere humans had cultivated the land for their own, but the thought that this dirt that was so much smaller compared to me was actually in fact part of something so much bigger.

I next thought about the water. This has become my favorite element to be in tune with because of the way it’s talked about in class. It’s loose and drifting movement makes me want to live life in the same way—just free and meandering, enjoying it for what it is. I don’t want to be a frozen river I want my soul to flow with happiness, compassion, and simplicity. There I go again focusing more on my inside feelings rather than my surroundings. I turned my attention back to the water and watched the way the sunshine hit it. This made me think about The Forest Unseen again in the journal about atoms. I thought about this for a long time. So many atoms make up a droplet of water; so many miniscule things unobservable to the eye make up this one little thing we can see. Makes me think about what is behind our reality. We see so many physical things but what is behind that? What’s behind the drapes of life? What goes deeper than the physicality of our world?