Sunshine has remarkable healing powers. Also, it's amazing how as soon as you pick a road, hundreds more tributaries appear, extending out to the horizon, and you can be so comforted by the fact that your choices are just beginning. I've decided after so many months and years of pondering, to go back to Columbia in the fall, to fill my days with learning, with inspiring, passionate, unique, creative people, with a constant buzz of life surrounding me, with sunshine on the Steps. I get the chance to craft out each step of my future, to dabble in the impractical and throw myself into the absolutely important. I want to get drunk on knowledge, to cram myself full on crazy personal relationships, to weave dance through my life in ways I haven't yet imagined. So I'll have more specifics for you in a bit, but for now, I know this: The Backpacking Sundress is coming to Manhattan :)
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Saturday, April 9, 2011
the beginning of a journey
Planes always make me reflect. There's something about how journeys that used to take days or months that we cram now into a few hours makes me feel as though I should do a few days or months worth of thinking while I'm above 30,000 feet in order to properly acclimate myself to the new destination. It never quite works the way I want it to, because there's only so much higher thinking that can be reached with constant peanut interruptions (or if you're flying Brussels Airlines, Milka chocolate bar interruptions), and you usually get cut off by a flight attendant very politely informing you that if you do not return your seat and tray table to a full and upright position, you might be the cause of a human shaped hole in the fuselage. But regardless of the difficulties, and my constant failings at actually closing my journal with a completed sentence at the end, there's something wonderful about the juxtaposition between all of the emotional turmoil of departure and anticipation of arrival, with the utter boredom of the actual flight. How often are we actually tied down, with nothing to do, no internet access (though even that has started to disappear, we have WiFi in the skies now), and just a book, perhaps, or a movie, or, gasp, our thoughts?
Travel entices me; I believe that it is impossible to visit somewhere far away from home and not return as someone a little bit different than the person who left. So this is the yet-to be written story, then, of my life of travel, to far away lands and frighteningly magnified personal reflections. It starts, as all of the best such stories do, with no certain knowledge of where I'm headed. I'm flying towards no precise destination, but hopefully with the strong enough belief in myself that I trust that I will continue to be able to find my way onto paths that feel right, for as long as they do, and then I'll be off bushwhacking again until I come across the next one. :)
The title for this blog comes from a moment of travel, a journal entry as I left home last summer, hoping to pick up some knowledge about who I wanted to be when I landed--best described, perhaps, as undefinable:
"I'm realizing that I want my life to be full of contradiction, pulled by opposite extremes, opposite multiplied into twelve dimensions. I love my backpacking sundress, my grande-non-fat-no-water-chai ready to leap off the tip of my tongue, my bracelet of Cambodian beads from Grace and the dental floss repairs to my purse and dress. I love the high heels tossed next to my running shoes and calculus books, in my pack still dirty from the Enchantments. I love my Noam Chomsky next to my Middle-Eastern docu-novels next to my children's books in French. I love the pointe shoes nestled next to the woolen ski socks, reminiscent of winters holed away in the Whistler house with all the children clad in the same crazy-bright-patterns.
I want to embody ALL the extreme metaphors in my head. I want bright sunshine and pounding, thundering rain. I want open beaches and high mountain tops, the tiniest lichen and the oldest of charred pine trees. I want New York City. I want love. I want challenges and ease, confidence and humility, assurance in myself accompanied by a ceaseless questioning of my path." - August 16, 2010
So, here begins my new medium for the ceaseless questions, perhaps something to define a little more the direction of my path. Let me know what you think, and thank you for allowing me to drag you along; I certainly can't promise that there won't be turbulence along the way.
Travel entices me; I believe that it is impossible to visit somewhere far away from home and not return as someone a little bit different than the person who left. So this is the yet-to be written story, then, of my life of travel, to far away lands and frighteningly magnified personal reflections. It starts, as all of the best such stories do, with no certain knowledge of where I'm headed. I'm flying towards no precise destination, but hopefully with the strong enough belief in myself that I trust that I will continue to be able to find my way onto paths that feel right, for as long as they do, and then I'll be off bushwhacking again until I come across the next one. :)
The title for this blog comes from a moment of travel, a journal entry as I left home last summer, hoping to pick up some knowledge about who I wanted to be when I landed--best described, perhaps, as undefinable:
"I'm realizing that I want my life to be full of contradiction, pulled by opposite extremes, opposite multiplied into twelve dimensions. I love my backpacking sundress, my grande-non-fat-no-water-chai ready to leap off the tip of my tongue, my bracelet of Cambodian beads from Grace and the dental floss repairs to my purse and dress. I love the high heels tossed next to my running shoes and calculus books, in my pack still dirty from the Enchantments. I love my Noam Chomsky next to my Middle-Eastern docu-novels next to my children's books in French. I love the pointe shoes nestled next to the woolen ski socks, reminiscent of winters holed away in the Whistler house with all the children clad in the same crazy-bright-patterns.
I want to embody ALL the extreme metaphors in my head. I want bright sunshine and pounding, thundering rain. I want open beaches and high mountain tops, the tiniest lichen and the oldest of charred pine trees. I want New York City. I want love. I want challenges and ease, confidence and humility, assurance in myself accompanied by a ceaseless questioning of my path." - August 16, 2010
So, here begins my new medium for the ceaseless questions, perhaps something to define a little more the direction of my path. Let me know what you think, and thank you for allowing me to drag you along; I certainly can't promise that there won't be turbulence along the way.
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