This I Believe First Draft (WIP)

One summer night while working as a lifeguard, I returned to the pool after my shift along with my coworkers for a guard party consisting of breaking almost every rule we were paid to yell at children for breaking and eating copious amounts of food.

As all the action began to die down and people settled into the wooden picnic benches around the guard table, I was reminded by one coworker that tonight was one of the last nights to view the annual Perseid Meteor shower. As much as I have always loved space and nature, I had never before ventured out into the night to watch a shower of stars. Looking him in the eyes, filled with the excitement of possibilities and of the end of summer, I asked, “well, do you want to go watch?”

Maybe in some alternate universe, these were the first words to a breathtaking romance. In this universe, it was only 10 PM and the sky was far too bright to see any meteors yet. He was leaving in three days for college and had just worked his last shift, while I was returning to high school for my senior year at the end of the month, meaning I probably wouldn’t see him again until the next summer. Still, as we lay there staring into the endless dark sky and laughing about some since forgotten joke, I couldn’t help but feel connected and a part of the entire universe I was existing in.

I knew then how much human connections to nature mattered. It led to my belief that above all else, sharing the natural wonders of the world with people you care about will lead you to a fulfilling life. As I giggled into the night, the world wrapped her arms around me and told me everything I needed was right in front of me.

After returning home to bed, filled with a lingering excitement, I randomly awoke early in the morning, with 4:00 AM staring at me on my clock. For a few minutes I groaned to myself at the idea of missing sleep, before remembering those stars I cared so much about. I grabbed a blanket and snuck out of my house with the hope to not wake up my sleeping family.

As I lay myself onto my asphalt driveway, the only place near my house with a clear view of the sky, I was again stunned by the beauty of the pinprick stars above me. Soon, I saw the first meteor and let out my breath, hearing nearby watchers yell out a cheer. We were all in this together, with a constant reminder of wholeness hiding in the sky.

Semester 2 Blog 1

As a teenager going through an ever lasting identity-crisis and uncertainty about what I want to do with my life in every sense (socially, academically, physically), pinning down specific beliefs of mine is really difficult for me. I know that I believe strongly in the importance of nature to help humans understand both themselves and the world itself. I have lots of stories about nature that I am considering, and a few beliefs I could use to frame them, but it’s still pretty wishy-washy. Once, when I was 12, I participated in a summer camp where we went spelunking (caving), and when we were deep inside of the cave, we all turned out our headlights and awoke to a world of darkness where we were left alone to think. The summer between junior and senior year I snuck out of my house to lay on the driveway and watch a meteor shower, only to be scared back inside by an early morning paper boy. Once, on a pilgrimage with my church, I went on a two hour hike up and down huge dunes of sand and wearily was presented with the beauty of lake Michigan in front of me. I have plenty of other stories like these that I think I could tell somewhat eloquently, I’m just struggling to come up with a specific belief. Maybe that nature gives us an opportunity to self-reflect, which helps us grow as humans? A second belief could be that nature connects us all when we stop to admire its beauty, and it can bring any people together.

For my passion blog, I don’t have any real desire to keep writing about just hiking, so I’m trying to think of ways to frame different activities involving nature with how the environment and climate affect us all. I read an article about how climate change is changing our National Parks, and I found it extremely fascinating. Writing about various topics like this and pollution and how it affects out-door recreation is basically what I’m considering. I think this fits into the updated assignment.

Two ideas for my CI blog that I got from reading the list included writing about college towns and writing about the environment in terms of food. The first is because I grew up in State College and now live in State College as a student. I could write for pages about town and gown and how universities affect the lives of residents in college towns. I also could write a lot about how much of a sheltered environment college towns supply, especially when almost all of your classes in high school included other children of professors. Many advanced class is my high school were full of extremely liberal students, and even Penn State’s campus is much more diverse in terms of ideologies than those classes were for me. Honestly I could probably write multiple CI blogs about college towns! For environment and food, I am actually taking a geography class specifically about these topics, so I assume I will quickly have a lot to say about how the two interact.