12 May, 2006

Even as I write my last college essay ever (which, by the way, is making me very glad to be done with school) I am excited for the future – particularly the near future. Tomorrow I start a week-long camping trip with friends to Assateague Island, a barrier island off the coast of Maryland and Virginia. The place looks phenomenally beautiful, and I can’t wait to have some down-time to read, write, draw, and maybe even record the first episode of a podcast that has been slowly taking shape in my mind. After that, I graduate, spend a week or so at home, and make my way up to Burlington, Vermont with my wonderful girlfriend.

It has finally started to hit me that this is the beginning of my real life. I am as free as I have ever been – free to pursue my own interests, free to “live the life that I have imagined” – and I feel like I could explode from joy at any moment. The transition has made me re-evaluate every aspect of my life, including this journal and this domain. I have always enjoyed writing fallen in the river, even if I have never been able to post regularly or give it the attention it deserves – and hopefully that will change in the future. I am going to keep this site alive, because I think it will only get better in the coming months. As for the domain “facedown.org” – it is overly dramatic, morbid, and just not indicative of the person I have become. Also, it’s expiring in a few weeks. In any case, I’m trying to think of a new domain name to register – something more hopeful, greener, closer to the earth and to god. When I make a decision, you (whoever you are) will be the first to know.

It has been raining for hours now, after a day of brooding skies and cool winds that swept the new leaves as they passed. All day I felt something of the expectation that Thoreau felt on this day in 1854, but the rain has come and I still feel it.

While at the Falls, I feel the air cooled and hear the mutterings of distant thunder in the northwest and see a dark cloud in that direction indistinctly through the wood. That distant thunder-shower very much cools our atmosphere. And I make haste through the woods homeward via Hubbard’s Close. Hear the evergreen-forest note. The true poet will ever live aloof from society, wild to it, as the finest singer is the wood thrush, a forest bird. The shower is apparently going by on the north. There is a low, dark, blue-black arch, crescent-like, in the horizon, sweeping the distant earth there with a dusky, rainy brush, and all men, like the earth, seem to wear an aspect of expectation. There is an uncommon stillness here, disturbed only by a rush of the wind from time to time. In the village I meet men making haste to their homes, for, though the heavy cloud has gone quite by, the shower will probably strike us with its tail. Rock maple keys, etc., now two inches long, probably been out some days. Those by the path on Common not out at all. Now I have got home there is at last a still cooler wind with a rush, and at last a smart shower, slanting to the ground, without thunder.