The Wilderness Between

My place is soggy. The constant rain over the last few days has seeped into the decaying leaves, making them as pliable as wet napkins. The weight of the water drags the yellow leaves beneath that vicious green ivy, where the leaves will rot away completely, turning into rich brown earth. Oh, the ivy always wins. It remains hardy against the pelting rain. Water runs off of the leaves as if they were shiny plastic. If only I could remain as buoyant under the storms of life.

I am sad that this is my last entry here. I will miss this place. Though I pass through it most days to get to campus, it’s not the same. If I don’t take the time to stop and savor the wildness around me, it simply becomes another in-between place. Neither here nor there, and therefore, nowhere I want to linger.

But I do want to linger here now. Even if it’s nowhere. It’s special to me now. I’ve watched it die. I’ve watched the seasons happen here. So that even when I hurry up the stairs, huffing and puffing, I find myself glancing about, looking for changes, for signs of some new development. I see trash and litter like flashing lights. I see the ivy, creeping ever forward. I’ve seen the trees undress until they stood bare, tall and proud against the coming winter winds.

That is not something you forget.

I will worry about that savage green ivy when the snows fall. And when at last it melts away, in February or March, I will venture up the stairs as if checking in on an old friend.

I am grateful for the chance of having gotten to know a place so well. To see its moods, its different faces. I want that sort of intimacy with every place.

I feel that I have discovered something in this place that is not here, nor there. I have found a peace in the passing of time. I have watched death happen, and life. What would it be like if we all took the time to treat every place as a destination instead of simply a space to travel through? If every step took us somewhere.

In a world where so much of our lives are spent in these between places, like college, like grad school, where we spend significant amounts of time, but never settle. Places where we are not quite kids and not quite adults. Isn’t it important for us to look around at these places? To slow them down, to really experience them instead of passing through?

I’m not even sure we know how to live with such intensity any more. I don’t think we know how to slow down and treasure, notice, watch these in between places anymore. Do we remember how to identify with the trees, or ivy? I think as poets, we try. We try to rekindle those ancient connections between land and man, space and soul. But as writers, that’s our job. To look, to see, to tell others of that which they are blind to.