Aliveness

The summer before college, I worked at Camp Union on Otter Lake in Greenfield, New Hampshire.  Much of the summer, I served as a hiking counselor leading small groups of kids through the beauty of the White Mountain trails.  I’d left home worried about my mom’s cancer, and distressed by the many young men my age dying in Vietnam.  It was a summer for deep introspection, and too many tears.  The poems I wrote that summer followed my feelings and were dark, but the kids and the beauty of my surroundings kept bringing me back to believing in my “aliveness”.  This past Saturday, as I paddled back to our pier surrounded by the beauty left by hard rains, I stopped and took in a deep breath of my aliveness, a gift from a summer long ago.  Today, take a moment to experience your aliveness!