“Write what’s in front of you,” Natalie Goldberg advises in Writing Down the Bones, a book I use selected chapters from in my English IV Honors class. And on a day when I’m still trying to imagine the unimaginable–backpack bombs detonating in a crowd gathered to cheer runners and celebrate some April sunshine in Boston–I take stock with this short list, from a pre-dawn forty minutes on the trails.

The yeasty-hot smell of pancakes coming off the griddle as I thread the path between the back of the kitchen and camp supply. At the the barns, a freshman girl in sweats, hair still sleep-tangled, rumbling a wheelbarrow from corral to manure pit up at Hunter. Mike Swan, striding up from the barn office to load the feed truck. An unusually big, very blue California jay squawking into the bushes, objecting as I climb up to the Phelps trail. Along the whole way, a view down and right to the sweep of the Valley, Thacher’s midway pasture a lake of yellow (little rain for greening up) and beyond it, the glinting of Lake Casitas. Roses in clumped profusion at the south side of each faculty house as I drop down into campus from the Observatory: Sawyer-Jones, Harris-Evans, Hooper, Haggard. I stop along the way at one rosy-orange bloom and, giving myself over completely to the cliché, stick my nose in deep, breathe in until I feel my chest expand. In the Library reading room window, a student so intent on her work that her hair’s an opaque curtain against any nod of hello I might give. The BBC, blaring from inside Mr. Shagam’s cottage. On the walkway to our house, the droppings of the red-tailed hawk I often see in the eucalyptus there, now crumbling to reveal small bones: mice.

Later, I’ll be in class with my 9th graders. (At the moment, they’re mucking stalls and checking in at breakfast, lining themselves out for their inevitably busy day.) I’ll relay to them what I heard President Obama say in his address to the nation: that this was “a heinous and cowardly act,” that he has confidence in the people pursuing the evil-doers, that selflessness and compassion and fearlessness can–and do and always will–stand up to acts of terror. One or two students will want to talk about it there, others in hours and days to come.

When the talking’s done, I’ll urge them to seek some silence–to go for a walk, a run, a lope into the hills, to linger with the setting sun from a spot on the Pergola–or even to go find the roses.