The Healthiest Place on Campus

The girls down the hall gave me that look again last night when smoke started drifting out from under my door. I was just burning a bundle of garden sage. My roommate had her entire family over all weekend, and after two days of conversations about mortgages, lease cars, promotions and spreadsheets, the room felt impossibly heavy. Laugh if you want, but spaces remember people. You can walk into a room and immediately tell whether someone cried there, argued there or spent days worrying. Maybe it’s all in my head, but twenty minutes of sage, open windows and fresh air always makes a room feel like mine again.

People keep telling me the campus has never looked better. Cleaner. Safer. Better maintained. Maybe they’re right, but I can’t shake the feeling that something has quietly disappeared. Every flower bed blooms at almost the same time. Every hedge has exactly the same shape. Even the weeds seem to know where they’re allowed to grow. I know that sounds ridiculous, but nature isn’t supposed to feel… coordinated.

The strangest part isn’t what I see. It’s what I don’t. I used to notice crooked bird nests tucked under the library roof, mushrooms after a week of rain, spiderwebs catching the morning dew between the benches. Tiny things nobody else paid attention to. Lately I keep catching myself looking for them, and finding… less. Not nothing. Just less. As if the campus has become really, really good at tidying itself.

Yesterday I sat beside the pond with my hands buried in the soil for nearly an hour. No meditation app. No music. Just dirt under my fingernails and dragonflies skimming across the water. Campus security eventually wandered over to ask if I was feeling alright. Apparently sitting quietly by yourself is unusual enough to warrant concern. I smiled, told them I was grounding, and they politely backed away with the careful expression people reserve for someone who’s harmless but definitely a little odd.

Maybe I am. I still collect smooth stones because some simply feel different from others. I dry lavender from my grandmother’s garden above my window. I make elderflower syrup every spring because bottled versions somehow miss the point. I don’t think crystals are going to solve climate change or heal broken bones, but I do think we’ve become strangely uncomfortable with things that can’t be measured.

That’s probably why I keep wandering into the woods behind the athletics fields whenever I need to think. Out there nothing asks permission to exist. Ferns grow wherever they please. Ivy ignores invisible boundaries. Fallen branches stay where they fall until the forest decides otherwise. It’s untidy, unpredictable and wonderfully alive.

So if you ever feel like everything around here has become just a little too polished, come find me. I’ll probably be under a tree somewhere with dirt on my jeans, a thermos of homemade tea, and absolutely no intention of explaining why that feels like the healthiest place on campus.

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