The Scouring of the Shire

It's been a long time since I've written on this blog, and now I think it needs some concluding, or at least more concluding than I was able to give it when I simply announced the "Well, I'm back." So, since I am not a hobbit, and my story does not end with a trip to the Grey Havens, I will continue with more of an epilogue.

I'm sure at some point I'll look over these entries and marvel at them a little. For now, I think I'll just let them sit and marinate. I can't even remember what I must have written in many of them. But I have some perspective. A summer and most of a semester at SU has revealed all the changes that were only beginning in Mexico. I find myself starting sentences with, "Well, when I was in Mexico..." to explain myself. Sometimes it's to explain something that happened to me, but a lot of times I have to explain why I'm not reacting like I did. Sometimes it's strange. I feel like a broken record, but after some time of saying it my attention has been drawn to it.

Now I look back on those four months and see a turning point. It's the point where Frodo accepts responsibility for the Ring at the Council, where it was no longer a task thrust upon him, but something that he elects to follow through on. Mexico is a trial, but one that I can look at through a mirror and say, "Yeah, it was good that I did that, and you know what else? The hair cut's not half bad." While I was there I wasn't sure I was going to be able to say that.

I think I learned lessons that I would not have been capable of learning in any other way than that. There were no short cuts. No one could have told me their stories about them and said, "Take it from me..." They were lessons I had to learn the hard way, through repeated attempts to continue in the old way only to finally become fed up with it and forge a new path.

And being back has been hard. It's been most of my meals alone in a crowded cafeteria. It's been weekends doing homework for lack of anything better to do. It's been occasionally wishing things didn't turn out this way, but knowing that in the end it's better.

But it's been okay.

"It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? ...But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you... But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something."

Sometimes you just keep plowing through. And eventually, I imagine, I'll look back on even this semester and be able to draw little links. Little plot twists and character developments that have fashioned my "present." And I'll be better for it.

This semester, I'm ready for graduation. It was something I never would have expected ever. And maybe I've even excepted the idea that change could even be a good thing. And that's a core change. A core change for the better. And I'm glad. It's a light that shines in the darkest of places.

So I hope that I won't be stuck mulling through the effects of the change forever. That with graduation will come other changes that include new people, people who know me as I am now instead of people who know me as who I used to be.

And I'm optimistic. Graduation is like moving. You can change your name. You can go from Katelyn to Kate--or vice versa. There is hidden opportunity. And so, a deep breath, and we keep on moving.


“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.”