When a friend told me there was a senior retreat going on, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Finally, a time to delve into introspection in a place where I felt safe – a nature setting with an openhearted community. This was exactly what I needed at a time when I felt scared and nervous for the unexpected next steps after graduation, as it tends to be hard to deal with uncertainty for someone like me who has found residence seeking, but not feeling an important certainty for many years – I wanted to feel the certainty of love and community existing.

What I received on retreat, in the midst of nature, campfire, a simple and beautiful coming together mass inside the cabin where we had communal mealtimes and reflection and laughter and openness, as well as personal reflection, was a re-awakening of my personal semester work of what I now feel is an experience of surrendering to be in the moment, to actually feel.

And so I felt with these words “you are cared and loved for” beyond measure really brought me to tears as I no longer continued experiencing this silencing of how I felt. And so from this retreat, to help me to surrender to this paradox of certain, yet uncertain because of its unexpected and changing nature, love, is what is saving me – to allow myself to dive into this ocean of emotions.

Even now writing this, I feel sadness that my time at Loyola is coming to an end, that my relationships have not been experienced quite the way I wanted them to (aletgomoment), I feel frustrated of not knowing what will happen to me next, but in surrendering to the words “you are cared and loved for” – love itself, born from a growing seed of faith in these words, I come back to life and can feel my heartbeat and my breath and the acceptance of myself at times, frustrating, academic mind and then I’m able to retrieve memories of joy and sadness over the past four years from the members of this Loyola community and then I look upon them with great gratitude, thankful for being able to feel this, thankful for the memories that live deep inside me.

And with this, I come alive, yet also rest in peace, ready for the next step.

Lauren Fontana is a psychology senior and can be reached at [email protected]