Dillard

What else is going on right this minute while ground water creeps beneath my feet?”(dillard 98)

While you are sitting in your room thinking that you are the only thing that is moving, are you right? What about everything else that is going on in your home, your town, your state, your country or even your world. What’s happening right beneath your feet? What about the tiny things that is moving across the earthy floor? What do you think about all the air flow moving that you can not even see? Can you not see it because you yourself are changing too?

Somewhere someone is smiling, or crying, or laughing, or dying. Somewhere something is walking, maybe running, or eating, maybe even starving. Does it even matter? What about the little things going on? Something is crawling in the brush of the woods, or the leaves changing as the weather get colder and slowly they lose their leaves. Almost as slyly as you lose an old part of yourself so new part of you can grow just like the new leaves on trees.

When I moved into my room in college I thought I would be perfectly fine the way I was. I thought I knew that the person I am is the person I will be forever. I was so quick to realize that I was in fact wrong. As a person you are constantly changing to fit your environment but changing is so subtle but yet to noticeable. Watching animals adapt to their surroundings make it look so easy.

Green Mountain College is located here, in the middle of Poultney. GMC is an environmentally oriented school, which coming from Long Island, you most likely know nothing about. Well you know what it means to be environmentally active and everything but you don’t really go out of your way to make sure that you are helping the Earth. In my house we always recycled and composted what we could, but it was never thrown in your face like it is here. It’s an eye-opener to come to the realization of what it truly going on around you and how it is affecting you. Being able to say that you do compost your food, and don’t throw your trash on the ground and that you are enviromently aware of your surrounds makes you feel like you are becoming a better person. You’re are helping resolve a large problem in tiny steps to benefit your future in the long run. Karma.

Living in on this campus you gain so much appreciation for the simplistic extravegance of nature. At home, you like the nice weather just so you can go to beach. Here, when it’s nice, you lay on the hill, jump in the river or do something outdoorsy just because you want to take advantage of every single minute of beauty the weather permits. When it snows here, it’s beautiful, not gross and brown within ten minutes of the snowfall like it is on Long Island.

Green Mountain has changed me into a completely different person in the past two months. As the leaves change, I change. As the grass grows, I grow. As the river flows around different bends and turns, I flow with the difficult obstacles thrown at me here. When the leaves fall, I fall but only to be brought up into something new, just as the leaves will do once winter passes.

I have no idea how I am going to write this paper on how I becoming one with my temporal and spatial landscapes in five pages. But I guess this is what college is about. Learning how to write, and how to balance your time to benefit your work habits and learning how to feel comfortable with the person you’re becoming.

So many things have happened to me here already and everything has been taken in to learn as a lesson and make me a better person. Meeting all these people is something I always thought was just a scene in a stereotypical movie. I am eighteen in college with people I haven’t known before August and right now, in this moment, for once, it feels right. And it hasn’t until now.

For the past two months I felt that I didn’t belong here. And now I am beginning to. Adapting to this whole college deal is new. It’s new to everyone who is a freshman and meeting new people is always something different to everyone. Being able to open up to someone you don’t know and saying, “Hey, what’s up?” takes a lot when you’re breaking the mindset that everyone hates you. Because in fact, nobody hates you, well they might, but they don’t know you, and you don’t know them. Finding out everybody’s cool hobbies and interests makes you ten times more open