Everyone’s talking about the moon last night. Sarah’s mom called as she and Sarah’s sisters were driving back to Ohio, just to tell us to look at it. Georgina wrote an LJ entry about it. Sarah and I saw it as we were walking around the UVM campus, appreciating the constantly changing display of beauty around us – the darkening eastern sky as the sun went down in the west, and a lone pink cloud; the Green Mountains looking gray-blue on the horizon; the eerie cool and quiet and white light of morning, but in the evening. We shared communion (a red apple Sarah found in her backpack) and talked about holy, earthy things. As we walked out from behind a building, there, rising big and yellow from behind Mt. Mansfield, was the moon, totally unexpected. It followed us the whole way home.

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.

Birds wake up every morning with the sunrise and start singing. They make a game of getting their breakfast, darting around in the air, landing, and picking earthworms from the soil. They have a hard life, but they never despair. Every morning is a celebration. Every morning reminds them that life really is as simple as getting from one day to the next.

Yesterday: Black crows fucking or fighting in the back yard, like blots of ink in the parched grass. It is too hot. The other birds aren’t singing; only the sickly hymn of the crows. The neighbor’s cats kill mice and leave them scattered around our property. One is on the steps leading down to the deck, half-decomposed and covered in flies. Two flat black beetles crawl into the carcass.

Today: A clump of downy feathers where the crows were, but no crows and no explanation. It is too hot. The first fallen walnut of the season, small like a green olive, lands near the horseshoe pitch. Its acrid odor stays on my fingers, and I carry it with me as I walk around the yard sipping whiskey and water from a coffee mug. It is Saturday and my friends are far away.

This is the summer of the crow.

While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. The gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house today is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too. Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoeing. If it should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass on the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me.

– from Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Tonight I turned my computer off for a little while so my room was completely silent. Again, the soft patter of rain outside was the most calming thing I could imagine. I have been on edge recently with so much to do. Tonight I’m worried about my nonfiction essay, which I’ve left untouched for far too long. Instead of writing, though, I sat in bed with my ear to the open window and only the light of my desklamp keeping me awake. Just listening was beneficial.

The rain adds another dimension to the way I perceive distance. Instead of a car passing, I hear a car splashing through a film of water on the road, and passing under raindrops which drum on its roof and smack the ground in all directions. The rain is loudest close-at-hand, singing more and more softly with the distance. The layers paint a blurry aural picture in my mind: the physical plant, the river, the highway, and home – nothing seems far away. The world is fuller when it rains, and the connection between all life is more obvious. Everything benefits from rain: the birds and the squirrels and the feral cats and the grass and my jade and me. I am less lonely now.

Lately, I’ll sometimes feel a chill in the air and look around to see a few errant red leaves on the sidewalk. Above me, the sky is gray. I listen and all I can hear is an almost imperceptible breeze moving through the branches above me. The scent it carries is that of dry leaf and soil – weary earth. It is early for this, I know, but I can’t help it. Fall’s approach is a great relief to me. It’s like catching sight of home after a long journey.