Thursday, October 26, 2006

Fall!!!

It's officially fall, here in East Lansing. The trees are changing colors, and starting to lose their leaves. I walk about half a mile to and from school everyday (MSU campus is very big) and I get to see the trees slowly change color day by day. Today, when I was walking home, I noticed how beautiful trees can be with a circle of fallen leaves around them. They looked like beautiful skirts of red and yellow. All the trees are small, and spaced out fairly distant, so there is beautiful green grass between the rings of trees.

Glorious green grass; grass that is so green, you can imagine that it is a soft pillow to lie on, and feel your cares melt away. In my head, I know that the ground is hard, cold and possibly damp-- but sometimes I want to stretch out beneath a tree on that lovely green grass, and just rest for a while. Of course, that was last week, before the leaves started falling, and it got too cold to think about lingering.

Now the ground beneath the trees in blanketed in leaves. Unlike BYU, where the leaves get raked as soon as they fall, here the leaves are left in a glorious wide swath beneath the trees, cleanly demarkating the line between tree area, and open lawn. Each tree has its own carefully marked bubble of personal space. The rings sweep gracefully across the green lawn, over the sidewalk, and then curve back on to the lawn. It is so pretty. And so peaceful.

Yesterday, I started meditating while walking home. The kind of meditation I was doing is called mindfulness. You breath evenly, and focus not on yourself, but on the world around you. As I walked home, I carefully looked at all the trees, at the people around me, and realized again how glad I am to be here in East Lansing.

I love it here. It is so pretty, and so peaceful. And I have friends. And no matter how depressed I get, I just have to remind myself that it is not Connecticutt and then I feel better. I have officially gotten over the bad spot. I used to try and do that with other things-- but it never worked, I would just say to myself-- no this is worse than that. But nothing is worse than living in Connecticutt: not speaking to anyone in person for weeks on end, and feeling like no matter what you did it was only going to get worse.

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