Meet New Village School Alumni - EMMA PRICE, Class of 2015
Jul 28, 2024 | by Amy Novesky
“Being alone on long, two lane highways, on top of a Sedona mesa, or in a coastal Redwood forest is the quickest way to find who you are and who you want to become.”
After Emma Price finished high school at the Bay School in San Francisco, she bought a 1993 Dodge Ram 250 van with blue shag carpeting and drove across the country alone. She spent months in the deserts of Utah, Arizona, Colorado and slowly made her way up the East Coast, across the Plains, where she picked up a dog she named Bug on the side of the highway in Iowa, and down the Washington-Oregon coast.
I chose to do the trip for two reasons. First, I needed to find who I was before I could move forward. It felt irresponsible to transition into college without first finding myself, my sense of spirituality, and purpose. Being alone on long, two lane highways, on top of a Sedona mesa, or in a coastal Redwood forest is the quickest way to find who you are and who you want to become.
Emma also struggled with severe anxiety in high school. She knew she needed a radical shift in her mental health. This is why she chose to travel alone. She wanted the freedom to express and move through deeper emotions without an audience.
Traveling alone as a young woman alone is challenging and scary at times, but that van trip was the best medicine for me and was profound in shaping my sense of self and identity. Choosing to take a gap year and embark on that journey was the best decision I’ve ever made.
And perhaps it was a journey that Emma could embark upon because of an earlier profound experience: the 8th grade vision quest, which she called the most pivotal 48 hours of her NVS career and young-adolescent life.
I feel like my whole NVS education was in preparation for those two days of isolation. It’s remarkable to me that at 14, I was able to sit alone, in a forest, with nothing but a sleeping bag and bottle of water. I don’t know many adults who would undertake such a challenge.
Emma’s time at NVS was shaped by intentional challenges—running, hiking, practical problem solving (moving a log up a hill with a rope and pulley, for example)—as well as unintentional challenges (getting hit in the head by an amethyst falling from a willow tree: “I don’t think it gets more Waldorf school than that!”). These challenges made her resilient and gritty and allowed her to sit in fear and anxiety while on her vision quest.
New Village built me to endure challenge and difficulty, and that has been the ultimate gift from my time at New Village.
Emma Price is currently a student at Berkeley where she is studying Anthropology with an emphasis in Indigenous land ethnic, sovereignty, and spiritual cosmologies. NVS instilled a desire to make her world big and to fill her life with new people and ideas. A key part of her education, although not explicitly anthropology related, is working in San Quentin. Every week, she teaches reading and writing to incarcerated men. Many of the students she works with are learning English as a second language, and New Village prepared her for this, too: Emma relies on the Spanish she learned from Señora Cabrera.