It begins two days before my thirtieth birthday in March, when I hear I have a summer job in Rhinebeck, New York, on the summer staff of the Omega Institute. As the spring ripens towards summer, my readiness to go snowballs into another plan: to use Omega as a departure point, no summer vacation, no three-month break from Chapel Hill, but an extended adventure, a search for new people, new places, challenges to meet on terms other than my own. In the calm of dusk and dawn, I know that I want to leave, as if forever.

When we think of our death, we imagine ourselves surrounded by loving friends, the room filled with a serene quietude that comes from nothing more to say, all business finished; our eyes shining with love and with a whisper of profound wisdom as to the transiency of life, we settle back into the pillow, the last breath escaping like a vast “Ahh!” as we depart gently into the light.

Sunlight falls across the white page, the floor, the picture of Buddha carved from stone on a mountainside in Borobudur, Indonesia; fills the whole room with light and even a little warmth on this end-of-winter morning in Allston, Massachusetts. The pigeons sit, as usual, on the ledge of the red brick firehouse across the way. Through the window I can see a blue-uniformed fireman sweeping the floor. Sometimes, late at night, I’ve watched them play cards. Occasionally the bells sound, and their engines fill the streets with frenzy and purpose. Otherwise, they wait, like me and not unlike pigeons, for their chance to be useful to the world.