"YELLOW CAMOMILE AND NEW FRIENDS”
Settling down after finals, I’m overcome with relief and mundanity. A full month of non-stop stressing, studying, writing paper after paper, came to a close instantly. As grades pilled in, I was sitting with a blank slate and a full semester’s worth of fatigue. After a week of celebrating the semester's close came my next challenge, flying to New Orleans with a bunch of strangers to attend my next course. The first assignment?
Do Nothing.
Seriously! That’s what our professor, Andrew Chater, said. Relax, Rest, Observe. You’ve got nothing better to do than exist. It was not what I had been conditioned to do, nor what I had been originally expecting. However I decided to try my best to lean into it. All I had to do was trust the process.
“The walk to the beach was no inconsiderable one, consisting as it did of a long sandy path, upon which a sporadic and tangled growth that bordered it on either side made frequent and unexpected inroads. There were acres of yellow camomile reaching out on either hand.””
A few hours after stepping onto Grand Isle, the same Island The Awakening is set, our group first walked to the ocean. Much like the novel, our path twisted and stretched, possibly retracing the steps Chopin once took. I took time to carefully avoid the yellow flowers, the camomile dotting the ground. Somehow the flowers had survived hurricanes and the test of time. It was almost like fiction was bleeding out into reality, and we got to see the world from the perspective of someone who lived it 100 years before us.
Our walk to the beach! (May 20th)
Sam Beating, Smashing, and Hammering a Chicken (May 20th)
Before arriving in the airport, I was worried about the individuals who I’d meet on this trip. However, even in the first day we all found ourselves extremely excited and happy to open up to one another. We keep joking, “We’ve only been with each-other for 72 hours?" because it feels like we’ve known each-other for much longer.
Yesterday, Thalia walked in from the patio with her mouth agape and stunned. She looked shook to her core. She had just finished the novel but refused to speak about the ending. I really wanted to know what happened at the end, so I got back to reading. One by one, everyone reached the final pages of the novel and had a similar response. I had to know the ending. By the time I caught up, the entire group surrounded me to witness my reaction. Feeling the eyes on me and flipping to the last page all I could respond with was a loud “seriously?!?”
Thalia absolutely GOBSMACKED (May 22nd)
Edna’s quiet walk into the ocean was devastating. Her either succumbing or rising above societal’s expectations placed upon her after she had fought so hard against the patriarchy and those around her was a brutal way for the story to end. To add insult to injury, it wasn’t just fiction.
We were planning to swim in the same water an hour later….
The same beach Edna died at (May 21st)
Standing waist-deep in the ocean, we discussed topics important to us: Hawaii culture, tourism, and eventually the topic switched to Edna’s unfortunate demise. We could feel the long-standing history that prevailed there, from the alluring perfume of the waves to the disappearance of the Cheniere Caminada. We tried shaking off the mood by discussing the legitimacy of her death (You have to walk FAR out to find somewhere you can’t simply stand!). However, physically sharing the space with the story changes things. The same sand, breeze, and subconscious allure are still prevalent, and the deeply rooted French culture still linguistically permeates the entire isle. While we aren’t tackling the exact same prejudices that Edna faced in the novel, her thoughts are so modern that it’s shocking she wasn’t a modern day theorist. We were floating in the water where Edna succumbed to her death, or the water Kate Chopin likely swam in while she grappled with similar radical ideas. History and contemporary thought oozed not only in the pages we read, but the air, the water, and importantly, the yellow camomile.
I’ll be honest here… I completely forgot to relax. The whole point of our adventure on the Isles was to unwind and just exist. Instead, I found myself busy every second of the day tanning, reading, and talking late into the night with people I first thought would kill me in my sleep (Richie, I’m looking at you!). I filled my time with urgency, trying to take it all in before it slipped away.
Sometimes being fully present is it’s own kind of meditation. Opening myself up to the land beneath my feet and the weight of the land’s history helps keep me grounded both in fiction and reality. Maybe I didn’t relax how I expected to, but I was living: shaping memories in a place with chapters much older than mine.