“College”

I attended Pennsylvania State University at the insistence of my parents. My plan involving community college (due to not having a clue what I wanted to do with my life), was inadaquete, and anyway I could start as an Undeclared. I finished my Bachelor’s degree in English in three years and graduated in the summer of August 2009.

The first two years were relatively uneventful. Heavy class load, good grades, and I discovered the unlikely bonding that came out of smoking herb, rather than the chaotic and dangerous ritual of nightly binge drinking.

My third and final year was the most adventurous by far.

In the fall, I spent a semester in Rome with ten other students. It was my first quasi-community living experience. We lived in the same hallway and shared a bathroom. Rome itself was provocative, ancient. I was in constant wonder at the contrast between the old and the new, in architecture, in relationships, in my own self to constantly evolve. Also having to cook for myself was a large life change.

In the summer semester I took a cultural studies course, which involved a month living in Bemidji, Minnesota, in the midst of three of the largest Indian reservations in North America, occupied by the Ojibwe tribe. The trip was completely transformative. Meeting with tribal leaders, both political and spiritual, learning about current conditions on many reservations, alcoholism, the struggle to retain their language, poverty, trash, contradiction at every turn, the guilt about my own ancestor’s/culture’s behavior, genocide, the resilience and kindness of people despite these enormous challenges, the embarrassment of giving a gift, how quickly a loving community may form, the deliciousness of the sugarbush, the wisdom and generosity and healing powers of the midewewin, the outlawing of sweat lodges even up until the 1990s… all these things I cannot tell in a linear fashion because this was my introduction to a world that was connected at many levels – above and below, and to each other.

It turned my hierarchy upside down; instead of seeing man as the most complex or highly evolved, lording over the plants and animals, they showed me a hierarchy of dependency where man depended on all things around him to survive, just as the animals depended on the plants, just as the plants depended on the earth, and it was the planet herself that deserved the utmost respect for sustaining all life.

Story of My Life (Part 4) – The Birth of Bright Sky