Becoming

Having completed this semester, out at the Campus Coffee Bean savoring the damp chill and the faint sweetness of my Darjeeling tea, I have the strangest sense that I am becoming someone. This person is not a stranger, but someone pike a first cousin or half-forgotten childhood friend. I wonder if this is a person I see in the mirror in the morning, my eyes still heavy with the sleepdew of dreams. Ravens swoop and circle and I recall the daemons of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series, the external manifestation of conscious or spirit, and how I was reflected on the notion; a raven seems fitting now more than ever. I am both unhinged and increasingly placed here. I have never been so busy as I have been over the past few months, and having weathered them well, I savor the potential to do it again. Insight and experience, I imagine, guiding me more and more in this direction - Flagstaff, sustainabilities, cultivating spirit, constructing place, fostering myself in applied academia, through applied ethics. The raven is a totem heavy with symbols, of transformation, intellect, life and death, persistence and change, adaptability and learning. This is both aspiration and action. The raven practices patience, reflection, creativity; but also wanders, explores, meanders. I am happy here, in a heady and rich way, feeling somewhat drunken with the spirits of this place, time, and labor.