Nature Walk-Will Geiger

At 2:10 on that Thursday, I awoke with a start at the sound of my obnoxious alarm clock. I vaulted myself out of my bed, assuming the floor was under me (it luckily was), grabbed my backpack and sprinted out of my room. I was in a delirious state of mind because a stone cold nap is a hard thing to get out of in the first place and then when it so happens that, without a ride, my only option is to hoof it a mile down the road, the mental and physical transition is difficult to make. When I finally get to the trail and join the class, fifteen minutes late, shirt soaked through with sweat, Dr. Redick was speaking of the variety of plant life found along the trail. The most striking visual experience I had the entire time on the trail was at one point when the sun had made a glare on the eclectic amassing of foliage on the trail floor and it was as if all the colors were jumping aggressively at my eyes. I paused a handful of times to soak up this effect and began to think about how singular this moment would be for me. Flow is the merger of action and spirit, and as I thought about this moment, the way the sun was reflecting off of the leaves to project a vibrant golden aura, I could focus on nothing else but this seemingly tangible energy. My thoughts even seemed to decelerate to a standstill. When the apex of my flow experience subsided and I was brought back from whatever planet I had drifted to, I began to relate the idea of the absolute present to the setting. What I had just experienced would only be possible in the fall, one of the many reasons why people like the fall is because the leaves of most trees turn to characteristically autumn shades of orange and yellow and red. When Dr. Redick showed us the Holly tree, time sped up and my thoughts found their way to the winter setting of the trail, with three feet of snow and the entire lake frozen over...I wish. Then further on, as we observed the damage that hurricane Isabel did to the Nolan, having knocked down thousands of trees and crippling the habitat, the park had to be closed for months. I could see the difference in height of trees that had re-grown in the time following Isabel and those that had survived and it made me think of the life span of a tree, how insignificant six months is when one lives for potentially hundreds of years. The contrast between the expanse of time that the Nolan Trail symbolizes and the specificity of the moment of flow that I experienced earlier blew my mind.