I invite you to the PRISMS forest.

By David Taehee Lee

Imagine you are having a rough day at school. You woke up late, got tardy-unexcused for period 1, forgot to bring your homework, and ended up slouching through the rest of class. Yet you are young and the day is long.You want nothing more than to throw your backpack on the ground and sleep straight from 5 to 11, waking up at dusk with regret for wasting another precious day of your life.

I invite you to the PRISMS forest.
Our school, as surprising as it may sound, houses a 19-arce large forest, brimming with life and energy. If the imagery of a whole green forest in a school sounds alien, you can call it by other names: “That place where they have a bench along a tree,” or “ Where you see the most green around.” Anything, really.

I rarely associate buildings with nature. If someone asked me to describe Seoul’s environment, I would say, “A forest of skyscrapers.” Buildings tens and hundreds of meters tall loom over the metropolis, plunging the red roadblocks and yellow lanes, blue subway entrances into darkness. The color green eludes the eyes. I only glimpsed at the color during the weekend trips where my dad and I would set up a tent in the middle of absolutely nowhere. However, the green would overwhelm me: I suffocated under the thick blanket of leaves, desperate to escape from the mossy scent and humid mold trying to sneak up my nostrils. The rustling of the leaves and chirping of the bugs didn’t help. I even missed the gray lights of the city at night.

Nature and manmade meet in perfect harmony in the forest. No boundaries block one place from the other. No one cleans the autumn leaves, and they dance in the air in the gentle breeze. We eat and drink and run with the animals under the same sun. We preserve nature as it is and even adorn it with beautiful structures like ponds, shrines and terraces. Amidst the fast-paced shifting of the 21st century, the forest remains untouched and fair, and it offers the same to everyone who sets foot on it.

In this sense, the PRISMS forest provides a haven from reality. A time capsule. There on one side I see Mother Gaia who is and will be forever, and on the other side a huge brick building dating back to the Civil War. The noble blood shed in the name of self-determination and freedom on the grass flows once more in a school with a vision of nurturing bright and creative thinkers and leaders: the perfect place for a growing boy to spend his adolescence.

Let us talk more about what makes the forest a unique force. Red Oaks, a New Jersey native, undergo seasonal cycles, producing new leaves in the spring and maples in the fall. A year-long film of a gradation of colors. The grass grows carelessly over each and every patch of bare land. It also houses many animals. I have seen at least three deer roaming around the outskirts, gaily grazing the green grass. Last Monday, I witnessed the parting of at least a hundred birds into the south, with a tumultuous flapping and many-a-chirping, which I fervently jotted down in my English notebook. Were they migrating to the warm south for the winter? Who knows? Nature’s mystic colors ever embellish itself.

While the physical body reaches maturity around 17, the spirit grows by the day, interacting with its surroundings and learning and enjoying. Growth never stops, after all: the forest shaped my late years of adolescence by reminding me of the past and showing how I must head out into the future, into the world.

I remember getting excited over the lively energy and youthful colors of America: athletics. Not your average all-study, straight-A-student factory Asian school, but with energy and interaction. Back in my pre-teens, long before I became aware of the academic pressure that pervades my life these days, I played soccer with my teammates on Sundays before our match against our arch-nemesis Daechi elementary school. I do not recall ever kicking a ball in my three years of middle school. I missed the green grass of the soccer field. I wanted people back in my life.

The forest gave me exactly that: I played frisbee throughout the freshman year. People came together into one under the embracing leaves. Other nervous freshmen gathered for the sport, but the forest gave even the greenies a place to fit in. Then of course “the old dudes.” Yang Jie, William, Steven, Curtis, Henry… where else would I have gotten to know all these people? The forest stands as living proof these people actually existed in my life. Their feet once left marks on the mud, and the frisbee on the trees serves as a reminiscence of the past, those high and bright hopes and dreams.

The forest persists. It lives. Last January, snow poured down real hard everywhere in New Jersey, and the school called it Snow Day. I remember the blanket of white going all the way up to my shins. The branches, seemingly already withered, shook violently in the blizzard. The white veil cast over green reminded me of a cold matcha frappuccino I had from Starbucks.

March proved sweet and fair; the green returned. If the forest ever slumbered for the past two months, it showed no sign of fatigue. The birds sang ever so gently on the thin twigs, the frog hopped merrily, and the trees started to spurt its greens for the year. Winter did not bend their lives; it gave them a well-deserved break so that they could return with reinvigorated life.

I learned all struggles in life serve a purpose and pass on. And that’s why I visit the forest in times of need: when I get upset about a test or a project, when school work overwhelms me, I go on a walk around Lambert Drive. I see the trees, tall and fair and green, the leaves healthy and growing and scattered casually yet so elegantly on the road. I hear the branches rustling and feel the cool evening breeze gush past my face. I regain my calm, ready to move on.

The forest served as a faithful companion in my darkest hour. As you may well know, I am a math olympiad guy (though I have considerably grown out of that stubborn thought last year). I put in a lot of time and effort into tackling abstract branches of mathematics. For fun, of course, but with a clear goal of making MOP (the national training camp). However, not all seeds grow up to thrive and blossom. After those Fridays when I left everyone else talking and eating happily to take online classes… despite the countless nights I would fall asleep at 3 with a notebook in my hands… I did not make MOP last year.

You would remember seeing me tremble in anxiety every other day last April. It took until April 27th for me to finally receive word of my failure. The month did not prepare me for this loss. I cried silently on my bed, shedding my tears from Tony, and cited the Lord’s Prayer in a desperate attempt to divert my attention from this grief. I could not help but rage at my incompetence and blame my shortcomings on myself, denying the 13/42 score report on my monitor.