Archive for January 2011
It’s been fantastically difficult to do anything useful this week, and that’s not to say that I haven’t been useful, but that I haven’t been satisfied with this halfway feeling that’s just taking up a lot of space without really doing anything; a balloon filling up with air, a final inhalation, or exhalation, I’m not really sure. Just holding my breath to find out
what these lungs had in mind. It’s hard to understand what my leaving means to this place, also. There are lots of redundant thoughts pacing around in this little room, their footsteps all muddied together. I don’t know what thoughts are coming and what are going; if thinking about my plans is really preparing to be home or just the hatching of a desire to escape that, honestly, has been incubating ever since I came back. And then, after all that doubt, I find out that I don’t really have any plans..?
neither here nor there?
I saw a photo from home the other day; snow in the backyard, little tufts of it on branches, leaves, tables; I thought of the taste of snow, the feeling of it. I don’t know how to say really what it is that I’m beginning to feel. It’s something more than a readiness to be home; it’s an understanding of what it means to do something from the heart. I took this adventure to test out a certain understanding of myself – and I don’t want to say now that I was being too optimistic, because I don’t regret coming, I don’t think that I’ve let myself or anyone here down. But over the months I’ve realized the ways in which I am not as ‘footloose’ as I would like to be; I cannot imagine myself here for an indefinite period of time. The arc of this journey was always curving back towards home, and for once I’m really glad to know that. Perhaps I’m taking up too many words to say something simple.
In other news, we just brought in our first harvest from the mushroom project that FINALLY began, after many many months of delay. I wasn’t able to be as involved as I would have liked with this project – it was too far away and I’m never really free. But the experience itself, nonetheless, was an unforgettable one.
Tomorrow is Uttarayan – the Kite Festival day… I haven’t made any plans, and since I’m still pretty pathetic with flying kites (haven’t really managed to fly one… ever…) I am not thrilled for it – but hoping something nice happens, maybe I’ll go to the old city, watch the sky flood with paper.
