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THE FIRST THING I noticed was the wind. It teased the back of my neck, tasting like pine and sage and canyons to be explored. My mother was in the front seat of the family station wagon, trying not to cry, and I stood waving goodbye in front of my new dorm, trying not to look too elated. I was a freshman at Utah State, on my own for the first time, on the edge of possibilities. My first semester I studied Great Books and Ideas with Dr. Moyle Q. Rice - how could I pass up a course with such a promising title? I remember October mornings, walking to the library where the professor with the great, bushy eyebrows would begin his interrogation of students. Dr. Rice wanted us to see the connection between the larger philosophical issues that have perplexed humans for centuries and our own internal upheavals. He urged us to discover what we believed, and why. I rose to the challenge, setting the alarm for six each morning to read from my own great books, searching for philosophers and prophets - Thoreau, Jesus, Kahil Gibran - while I wrapped myself in sweaters and ate steaming bowls of oatmeal. In the afternoons I tucked myself away in a forgotten nook in Old Main, in front of a sunlit window where I could hear the pigeons coo and the ancient steam heaters breathe, and devoured books about ancient Greece and Rome. I wandered Old Main Hill at night and sat in the outdoor theatre, filling up with ideas and canyon winds and the moist scent of cottonwoods. Many students have a Moment of Clarity that comes to them. They might be playing a violin concerto on an empty stage, tracking mule deer with first graders at a nature center, writing a business plan for a community nonprofit, building strawbale homes on a volunteer project in Mexico - when they suddenly, irrevocably know: This is what I want to do with the rest of my life. They find the holy grail of their own personal meaning. That moment, for me, came with my final course assignment from Dr. Ken Brewer. Our task was to write a 45-page book of poetry. Dr. Brewer told us to paint visual pictures with our words. He told us to scratch out the obvious word choices - beautiful, peaceful, love - and describe what beautiful was, what love was. more
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