It’s like trying to trick a compass. This feeling of mine.

August yields the last dregs of Vitamin D and blistering rays while the waves and wakes bestill on the water and the city folk make their way back to concrete jungles. Normally, the summer’s Tasmanian blur begins to slow and phase into a sharpness of mind and mission that signifies another scholastic year. This time not so. No more lessons learned in static standstill, but received and understood with the intent to share it all.  As I will have found what so many wanderers before me have surely come to know. As to what that may be I haven’t yet a clue.

My inner clockwork, systems – skeletal and spiritual, living and breathing or hypotheticals, are grinding to a halt. Gear by gear rusting and eroding while the air cools. The hour is change, or becoming very near.  The needle points north yet a compass I am not.

I’m running west. To chase each dusk down the coastline. To set with the sun every day, knowing its beauty and living blessed. To watch the sunrise half a world away.

It has turned so very quiet, within a few brief days, and hundreds of thousands of shallow breaths.

As if maybe had no one been watching, one may believe it had been as such always, for infinitely many turns of the moon.

Yet just days ago, the truest friends of my heart bound themselves in love and marriage in the eyes of God and pirates. A freeze-frame of joy in time’s relentless ticking.

I traveled east to immerse briefly in the necessary mundane segue that often preludes greatness, discovery and immensity. Hot, restless, rewarding….but that was then and here we are now, at a crossroads.

Rest and relocate, turn and turn and turn again and I’m back in the semi-present moment. Trek to Michigan with the newlyweds to reset and center whirlwind thoughts. Hiking, pumping lungs, new shoes break blisters on shiny pink heels, preparing for the journey west where the mountains, valleys and gorges give bountifully yet take many prisoners. But here and now, to the north, where we rest and make merry- thrumming musik among wise, silent birches and creaking maples holding court. This is the moment.

Yet I digress, one week… to dismantle my compass. No tiled halls nor graphite filling little bubbles on scantrons, no tests to take. Not on paper anyways. I’ve absorbed what I will in academia and I wish to sit in the lecture halls of the oaks where the blackbird takes to the podium and we forest creatures listen to his knowing song. In shaded green woodlands, down white lined pavements, in hearth and home and as far as these wings/wheels/paws/feet may travel.

Next week our friends and family will gather from the corners of creation to celebrate in love and song under the cover of an oaken forest. Welcome home. Community and peace in its element. And then… so shall it begin in full, this grand journey and adventure. So bye for now.

-Analise Elle