Stepping on the Moon Anonymous

The snow crunched underneath my feet as I walked, and I wondered how it must have felt to step on the moon. I had decided to make the most of the cloudy day by exploring and taking pictures at a local state park. Was the view from the moon anything like this? I think similes fail us when there is nothing truly comparable.

In the summer, my sister and I visited our grandparents in a small town in southern Germany. We decided to follow a trail our grandfather had showed us years ago. We had a faint memory of the path, but as the forest surrounded us, this memory became more and more hazy. We were lost. When we began to trace our steps back home, we ran into a little altar in the middle of the woods that was surrounded by a small waterfall, a cross, and an old wooden bench— beauty in a dark, lonely forest. My sister and I sat down and instantly forgot that we were lost.

Ironically, I have learned to foster this sense of adventure through more passive and indoor interests. Reading Jack Kerouac made me want to trek across the nation; Richard Feynman told me bluntly that there is an entire world in the atomic scale. Bacteria are much larger than atoms, but when my friend Emma and I peered through the microscope into the microscopic...