Awakening

It was the summer before college and I was working at Camp Union in Greenfield New Hampshire at the foothills of the White Mountains.  I was a member of a small team that took groups of campers out to hike the White Mountains. We taught kids from the Boston ghettos compass skills, the constellations, edible berries, lean-to crafts, and survival and life skills they wouldn’t learn in the ghetto. 

My mother was slowly dying of cancer, so it was good to be far away from home where death lingered in every corner.  However, my tent mate was a college student from France, and he constantly talked about all the young men our age dying in Vietnam, but I was hiding behind golden sunsets and stars you could reach up and touch.  Halfway through the summer my mom, wrote me about a family friend killed in Vietnam, and as I reread the letter, I remember tears streaming down my face.  That night, the sunset lost its magic glow and I cried hard, as I watched the day end with an awakened mortality.  My mother would die in a year and I would lose other friends in Vietnam, but sunsets slowly regained their magic glow as my awakened mortality drove me to find joy in each day.  Awake to the joy of life today!