The wind in the trees

My head is fuzzy beneath my green and yellow wrap, but when I breathe in slowly, deeply, the air pushing off the river fills my lungs, my chest, my fragmented mind, and I believe that it is time to force myseld to find some words. I haven't written anything in days, not even a few sentences in my red moleskin book (thank you, sarah) for my own selfish soul. It's because I've been sick for over a week, right? Because my days have been so full of sunny skies and lengthy runs and paint fumes.

Thursday night I dragged out some old journals- from 2008/2009. I was cooly surprised by what I found. I expected to find a girl who could speak of nothing but her all-consuming love for a God she discovered years before, a girl who knew what her dreams were, knew what she wanted, and thought she knew where she was going. A girl restless but satisfied. Without revealing myself word for word, I found instead someone struggling with the collision point between the expected and the desired. She knew God had something profound for her life; she was driven by some unexplainable force to go.. to set aside the common life and attempt to find a sense of being, belonging, total loss and completion in something less-defined, less known, more her own.

Three weeks ago I sat around a fire with a girl who knows my soul as well as I do, a boy who three months prior told the girl to tell me to stop running (in life), and another boy whose quiet, substantial eyes led me to scribble my number on a post-it note at a temp assignment. What is now fondly referred to as "the happiness circle" was developed that night. "I'm happy when..".. "---- makes me happy"..


A week later two giggly, excitable girls approached myself and the boy with the eyes while walking on the canal.
"Can we ask you a question on video for our AP Psychology final project?!"
of course.
"What makes you happy??"

What makes you happy. What makes me happy..?
A thousand things. A million things! I've never loved my life as much as I do right now. The people filling my days and weeks, whether in body, in extensive phone conversations, or through thoughtful emails, are some of the very best I've ever had in my life. I have at least three places I can easily call home and half a dozen more that feel like my own. I have no boss, no one to report to or check in with. Hundreds of mountains await me a short trip from my current locations. My student loans are so close to being paid, without a required payment until 2014. My body is allowing me to do things it never could before. There is a place within me that is happier, more calm and at peace than it ever has been.

This will not sound nearly as fluid a thought when written, as it has been running in me over the course of a few weeks, yet I have to continue here to say the following:
I believe I've found that happiness and fulfillment are not the same thing. If you search your soul, not forgetting to engage your spirit as fully as you are able, and can truly say that you have both simultaneously, I believe you've arrived at something monumental. As for me, I have not. That's not intended to be depressing, at least it's not for me, it's just something I've realized.. something I long to grasp for myself, to attain in this life.

And now my fuzzy head is overpowering this incredible 6pm northcountry air..
and still, I really just want to climb some stuff. :D