leaf kisses

Our campus is small and beautiful. With an arboretum of trees both handsome and delicate around me (literally, Hendrix’s campus contains every species of tree native to Arkansas) I can walk anywhere in only five minutes, and I love that. When it’s dark, the walkways are lit by softy shining lampposts that guide my footsteps. With everything touched in an aura of gentle glow to guide my way, it eases my mind and soul to take a nighttime walk.

The sky is usually clear, painted with deep strokes of midnight, a sparse sprinkle of stars, and loose trails of humble clouds. The nighttime never fails to possess an ineffable distinctness. It is beauty. It is freshness. It is reality. Usually, though, I take my nighttime walks when my heart is heavy—when my world is caving in, when the last thing I have time for is a walk, but I take it anyways because it might just be the only thing that gets me through ‘til morning.

I didn’t take enough walks last semester.

One night, though, when the leaves where falling fast and my previously soaring heart was falling faster, I pulled on my boots and coat and trudged out. I can’t remember exactly what was burdening me on the occasion. My worries last semester stemmed almost exclusively from academic distress, but seemed to extend into many more realms of life than my course schedule contained. I guess that’s the way it is when an education becomes an interconnected web of all the parts of a person that were once separate and finite. Everything I do, every class I take, and every conversation I have…they all seem to come together.

The air was rather cool that night. It was the peak of fall and the leaves were swirling around me, falling from all those big trees in every direction I looked. I love trees. By the glow of the lamps, their trunks were visible, but their outstretched branches were only partially apparent, melting into the darkness of sky. I couldn’t tell where the tree ended and the sky began. I couldn’t tell where sky faded and tree began.

I felt like those trees. Growing up, reaching out, and expanding in every way, but at the moment blinded — unable to see where I was going, or where I ended, or where the world began. I was confused about the interconnectedness of everything. I, too, was melting into the vast, beautiful, wondrous, and dark sky. It was poetry, but my eyes saw nothing but darkness.

In retrospect, I look at the heartaches of last semester and I realize that I was being humbled. In everything I did, everyone else seemed better than me. And they were. From school to relationships to appearances to spirituality to everything else in my life, I realized how small I really was. It was heartbreaking. It was frustrating. But it was greatly humbling, and I needed it.

I was angry too, though. I’ve never been angry before, not about anything important. I was mad about school, and frustrated about a lot of other things. Those were difficult parts of learning humility, but I was downright angry about religion. For a very long time now, religion has been the place where I have found the core of my identity—through being a Christian and having a relationship with God. But last semester I was exposed to a side of what some people call Christianity that was repulsive and deeply hurtful. It tore me up so bad that I couldn’t do much more than just literally talk about it for a couple weeks. Christianity was my place, but I seemed to have lost it through this exposure. I was so angry that I couldn’t even cry.

Last semester I felt humility and anger. Over and over again, and it wore me down.

But it was nighttime. And it was beauty, and it was freshness, and it was reality. It was quiet, so I trailed off the lamp-lit path of my walk and lay down on my back on a bench and stared up at that deep darkness through the filter of the braches of an oak tree. The leaves flittered and fluttered, and then a gust of wind came.

Amber kissed my face. Crimson, copper, and gold, too.

And as the leaves fell from the trees whose branches had seemed to melt into sky minutes before, I didn’t shake them off my cheeks or lips. I let them fall. And it’s not that I figured things out, because sometimes things aren’t meant to be figured out. But it made a little more sense that everything was a part of everything else. The sky and the trees, their falling leaves and my softening eyes. School and spirituality, religion and relationships. The fact that I was angry and the fact that I was being humbled. The part where being humbled made me angry and where being angry eventually made me humble.

And I don’t claim to be humble now, nor will I tell you that my anger has subsided. In ways, that would be true. But in other ways, it wouldn’t. I do know, though, that when crunchy flakes of sky and tree caressed my tired eyes and swollen heart, I believed.

I believed that that God was bigger than religion. And I believed that being angry was okay. I believed that autumn was meant for nighttime walks and that college was meant for failing a couple times. I believed that the sky was big, and that I was really small, but that it was good that way. I believed in crisp air and messy laying-on-a-bench hair. I believed that the lampposts were glowing for a reason. I believed that it was dark, but that morning would come. I believed in life, and that it was supposed to be this way. I believed that the leaves really were kisses, and that they were from God, and that things were going to be okay.