January 25, 2003.
Breathing Space


Oprah's print media vehicle, O magazine, offers this very peculiar feature in each issue. It is a two-page spread called "Breathing Space." Breathing Space is just a huge color photo of a glorious bit of scenery, with some copy encouraging you to fully appreciate the landscape's wonders. Feel the cool sands massage your feet as you walk this sun-kissed strip of Tahitian beach, it says. Or, Listen to the crunch of soft snow under your boots as you stroll along this stunning mountain vista.

Frankly, it's a pretty stupid feature.

But the idea works. I am here to say that Breathing Space is a good idea, as long as you can experience it in Real Life.

Last weekend was declared a Breathing Space weekend. I made arrangements with my friend Karen to check into the guest cottages at our alma mater, Berry College. I think we could teach a few things to old Oprah.

I've written before about my affection for this school and especially for the college campus. It is a place full of wonders. When you attend school there, you hear one superlative about the college over and over, which is that Berry is the largest contiguous college campus in the world. I don't know if that's true, but man, it feels like it. 26,000 acres of goodness — plenty of breathing space.

Every time I go visit, I seem to fall in love with it a little bit more. By the time I left the campus last weekend, I was stumbling around bleary-eyed, wondering how it is that I ever got to go to school there.

It is just so right in so many ways.


It is one of the places in the world where I feel like everything is okay. It sounds funny, but whatever serenity and gentleness I have managed to cultivate in my personality, I think I owe to this place. Part of my heart lives here. It helped me become more of the person I want to be.

And it's just so beautiful, that it makes you feel better just being there. I swear I could feel my blood pressure dropping when I drove onto the campus.

It is, in many ways, a very holy place — at least to me. It is a place where I feel closer to God.


Going back to Berry is like rounding up the usual suspects. I amble and shamble about all the old lanes and visit my favorite spots on campus. I see who's living in my old dorm room, I sit for a while beneath my favorite tree.


Thomas, did you know that they fixed the clock tower in the Ford Auditorium? It actually keeps time now. (It was broken for years.)



On Sunday morning Karen and I hiked up to the reservoir, maybe a mile or two from the rest of the campus. It was pretty cold on Sunday — maybe 25º or 30º F, but we hardly cared.

(Karen is a very petite girl, just a little slip of a thing. She's strong, but tiny. I am sure that we made The Odd Couple, walking around campus together. You can't tell from the picture above, but my feet are cleverly positioned about a FOOT below hers. The difference in our physical makeup is so great as to be amusing.)


I really like winter days like this — crisp, clear, and bright. I hardly mind the cold, so much as long as it's nice outside. Saturday was perfect weather for walking, talking, taking silly pictures.

When we left the reservoir, we walked back down to the water wheel. In its earliest days, the campus was entirely self-sufficient— they used to grind wheat with the power generated by the water wheel.


The water wheel still turns. They get it rolling once a year during the college's homecoming festivities. It's pretty impressive in scope.


Before we left the water wheel, we broke little plates of ice from the pond that feeds the mill, and flung them across the frozen pond. It was surprisingly satisfiying to hear them splinter into pieces and finish their slide across the ice. (Note the plate of ice that Karen has just released in the photo below. She's not disco dancing, she's flinging ice!)



On Friday night, before Karen arrived, I had a couple of hours to myself — a few crisp, cold hours to walk around, and re-visit my favorite old haunts, and think.

A lot of students were gone from campus for the MLK holiday, so my night reverie was quite undisturbed.

The night was very dark, and very cold, and very still.

Some parts of the campus really do feel like holy places to me. I would take off my shoes to walk them, if it weren't 25º. On Friday night I walked to one of those holy places — to the edge of the lake field.

Really, it's just a gigantic field that runs along a couple of the campus roads. But at night, when it's very dark, it looks almost like a lake, all swathed in blue mist and moonlight.

Here is a picture of the lake field during the day. Not much to look at in the day, but at night, it is another place entirely.


I walked to the edge of the lake field and I saw a few dark shapes out in the mist. The night was dark, and blue, and the shapes in the grass didn't seem to be moving at all. I stepped out from the edge the field and some dried leaves crackled under my feet — and suddenly a huge herd of deer stood at alert and looked at me.

I could only smile.

And then — then — then — oh, then I heard a sound coming from far away. It was the sound of the geese honking. That's got to be one of my favorite sounds in the world, you know. Those crazy Canada geese honking it up, flying in formation.

I could hear the geese, but I couldn't see them. I kept searching the sky for them, searching — and then a moment later they burst into light. Their wings were edged in pure white light shining from the roof of one of the campus buildings. They were edged in white and they flew against a blue velvet sky and just as quickly as I had seen them, then they were lost to my eyes in a stand of trees and I couldn't see them anymore.

That is how I know that God was with me.