There's something special about Ash Wednesday.

I didn't always think there was. As a boy, it meant the onset of Lent, a season very few children have ever found any use for.

I particularly disliked Lent because it meant Easter was not far away. And I particularly disliked Easter because when I was 8 years old, I was violently ill on Good Friday and Holy Saturday, an experience my young mind would associate for years to come with Jesus' own agony and suffering and purging of the world's sins.

The annual commemoration of all these events is something I would rather not think about.

Looking back though, I think I was always attracted to certain things about Lent. The Mass' altar and ceremony are stripped of ornament. The faithful are more somber and introspective, waiting in the shadow of Easter's rejuvenation. And there's a maturity required to really live the season, to participate meaningfully in fasts or reconciliation.

Above all, I think there's a complexity to Lent that one comes to appreciate only with experience and faith. I know I wouldn't believe someone who just told me that new life comes from death, that suffering yields happiness or that the stripping away of our material burdens leaves us richer, fuller people.

That is the kind of thing we learn only over time, season after season, gaining a different understanding with each return.

And Ash Wednesday has become for me, over the last couple years, the time when I revisit the waste and worth of my own life and begin, again, to try and increase the latter by reducing the former.

We are reminded of our mortality; we take possession of it-even wear it on our foreheads-then turn inward to see how well we have used the gift that is our life, how well we have reciprocated and given back to the world.

Yet, as emotional beings, it can be hard to find the peace that's necessary for introspection and meditation; it's hard for us to strike a balance between our competing passions, to find "strength beyond hope and despair," as T.S. Eliot calls it in his poem, "Ash Wednesday."

Often, we fall back on a kind of artificial normalcy, the even rhythm of courses and extracurriculars, and think ourselves at peace. Perhaps it's not artificial so much as temporary; all the same it doesn't satisfy the deeper needs of the soul.

Those are fed by something special. For me, it's always been solitude, a retreat from others and a return to the place where I'm connected with the larger world. It's almost like tracing the phantom path of my umbilical back to the land. It's coming back to a familiar field in the mind and treading it again and again until dusk.

In "Land," the Irish poet Seamus Heaney compares this retreat to the experience of working a crop for a season. He realizes he's dependent on the harvest and visa versa, yet he also comes to be satisfied with the crop's yield, because it is a product of his love. He writes,

I stepped it, perch by perch.
…and often got up at dawn
to walk the outlying fields.
I composed habits for those acres
so that my last look would be
neither gluttonous nor starved.
I was ready to go anywhere.

He looks out across his life each day and accepts it as his own, as yesterday we looked into the face of last year's ashes and saw our own sooty reflection. We looked into the ashes and said we believed-believed our bodies will soon return to dust and we will be left only with the souls that we have worked to keep healthy.

It's hard to describe how to move from the business of our everyday lives to that place of balance and peace, but I'm convinced walking has something to do with it. Visiting unfamiliar places, especially places that seem abandoned by the rest of our society, always helps the mind wander.

Just take a stroll westward on Laclede or West Pine and see how quickly the memories of school recede and another little world opens up, how the passions are quelled and peace laps up around the island of the soul.

Or if your ambitions are really high you may even spend a weekend exploring some of Missouri or southern Illinois's beautiful wilderness. That is my Lenten resolution: find a spot of silence on the landscape of my mind that's as devoid of waste as a forest trail. Find a spot and recall T.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" prayer, "Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood / Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still / … Suffer me not to be separated."

Andrew Ivers is a junior studying English and political science.