08.25.2009 “Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying ‘I will try again tomorrow.’”

This quote, beautifully written in chalk on the wall above my bed, is a constant reminder of the need to take each day at a time. It was the first thing I noticed in my room as I walked into the seemingly desolate, austere space loaded down with backpacks and exhaustion, not sure which one was heavier. As I lay in bed that first night and looked above me, I pondered the possibility of the next two years, how often I would need to reflect upon that quote as laid my head down each night.

The evolution of the last two weeks began with a slight low, slowly progressing into a beautifully rising curve, culminating with all the growth and exploration that took place throughout the last leg of phase two orientation. In the spirit of just plain synopsizes of events, bear with me. I intend to attempt to cover as much as possible, focusing more on the emotion of it all, on the moments within the activities - the fractions that make up the whole that are most salient as I page through these past couple weeks of memories on the bus ride back from PG.

I was challenged immediately during my time in Belize City, my first real personal battle with its chaos and intensity. And to put it bluntly, I was dominated. I naively thought that I understood the dangerous nature of the city, the precautions, the warning signs, but was brutally rebuffed during our excursion to the market one day. We spoke incessantly throughout orientation about safety, gender dynamics, etc, but I don’t think I fully understood the restrictions, and dependence that comes with my gender until that moment; the realization that I’m completely limited, vulnerable, and dependent, simply because I’m a woman. It infuriates me, but at the same time, I understand that I must accept this as the reality of my world here. But that won’t stop me from throwing a mild temper tantrum along the way…

To make the story short, bicycle stolen. Vulnerability palpable. A little dignity lost. Generally speaking, it was a harsh reminder, slap on the wrist (quite literally), that I’m a visitor in this country, and that it makes me inherently susceptible - to danger, to manipulation, to exploitation. My lack of awareness of the city coupled with a bit of poor decision making with my community-mates was a recipe for weakness – a weakness that was taken full advantage of within mere seconds. That left me feeling inadequate, having something taken from me, quite literally right out of my hands, in broad daylight, and feeling completely and utterly helpless.

The whole experience is quite amusing now, picturing us walking back with one less bike, dignity trailing behind us a few yards back, like puppies returning home with their tails between their legs. But we were greeted by wonderful community mates with worry and empathy tangibly present among hug-giving and sarcasm. It is in those moments that I can’t imagine experiencing this without community around me; without individuals to challenge and support me, to call me out when I’m being a brat, and to hold my hand during situations like the one mentioned above.

Ever since my acceptance into JVI, I’ve struggled with its differentiation with that of Peace Corps, especially after my year in a Peace Corps affiliated Masters program. It seems to boil down to solitude versus solidarity – the growth that results from individual struggle and reliance on oneself versus reliance and struggle within community. But I’ve come to appreciate the concept of living in ‘intentional community’ more than I ever anticipated. The life skills acquired by simply learning how to live with people different from oneself in a curious, foreign culture is simply invaluable. It is a skill that’s power is of the utmost importance – which pervades all facets of ones life. The dynamic of quite literally living with strangers in an intentional community is an experience which I may never have again (well actually, I intend to have it again), which will undoubtedly pull out my inadequacies, my frustrations, perhaps my strengths, too, more than I can comprehend.

With that being said, I also must confess that the concept of community, and the difficulty that comes with it, is still quite foreign to me. The potential difficulty and conflict that come with community are more out of my current realm of comprehension. It all boils down to learning to accept people’s bad habits - not being able to move out, to push them away, when they leave their clothes out, when they forget their keys, when they play their music too loud. It’s all about loving people who may drive you crazy on a daily basis, especially when they’re not bound to you by blood. This, folks, may just be the biggest challenge of it all.

Anyway, the day after the bike theft, home stays ensued.

I stayed at a home only a few blocks from our house with a family of all women. All things considered, it was a great experience, but one that left my head spinning (literally and figuratively). It was difficult, spending almost the entirety of our days inside a stuffy, incredibly hot, three room structure. But this is reality of many lives here, the limitation that comes with existence in the city. The fact that it is unsafe for women to go out after dark, to roam the streets alone. It left the majority of time devoted to television watching, with the only two channels of cable they received. The days were long, and I found myself looking at the clock in between American soap operas and game shows.

It made me reflect upon television itself and how ubiquitous its presence is across the world, and how many people fill their free time with its light. I say this not to conclude that all Belizeans spend all their free time mindlessly watching television, but at the same time, realizing that it’s certainly a presence in homes.

Independent of the heat and the television watching, my experience was quite lovely. The mom babysat two children throughout the day, one six months and one two years old, and her two children left in the house were six and eighteen. My days began cuddled up on the couch watching cartoons with the younger children (which made me yearn for IZ), playing cards and learning Creole in the afternoons, engaging in legitimate, intriguing conversation with the oldest daughter whom I adored. I was even able to help my host mom with the cooking, though it mainly consisted of us chatting while I watched her make tortillas and rice. All in all, I walked away from the house with no profound conclusions or realizations, but a simple appreciation and limited understanding of Belizean home life.

My favorite ‘moment’ of the stay was a silly one, but it rings in my mind and makes me giggle every time it crosses my mind. There was (of course) a massive (even on local standards) rat that lived in our kitchen. They would speak of it, and I would just dismiss it, and forget about it moments after. One evening we were all freshly bathed about to watch ‘Duets’, the obsessively popular American Idol like local television show here, when my host mom ran from the kitchen yelling that she’d ‘gotten him.’ We rat over as we watch the rat, sadly stumbling around the kitchen floor with saran wrap stuck to his face.

We all began to giggle and scream as we climbed on the rickety wooden kitchen chairs to free ourselves from its potential gracing of our feet. My host mom then began to proceed to throw fruit from the kitchen table in order to kill him. From that point on, the scene was ridiculous. These four pajama clad girls, wet out of the shower, giggling and screeching as we threw plantains and mangos at the kitchen rat. (I threw plantains intermittently when I pulled my head out from under my shirt – I was terrified of seeing what a single mango may do to the body of a rat). Needless to say, the experience left me light hearted and eased, despite the fact that we failed in our attempts to capture him, and I was left to hear his squeaking as I drifted off to sleep that night, hoping that he wouldn’t make his way to the bedroom…

Anyway…I came back from home stays with the reality of life present in my mind, prompting everything to bounce in my head, forcing me to analyze the struggles that formed my observations and feelings about life here. Wondering how biased and deeply flawed my opinions are from on my own cultural perspective, but also feeling that certain factors were and are fundamentally wrong. I was so incredibly ready to flee the city and my thoughts, to get on that bus to PG and rejuvenate myself (which felt incredibly ridiculous as I’d only been here for two weeks).

I must admit passed out the moment I slouched into my bus seat at 5 am, but when I awoke to green filled windows of mountains, palm trees, and lush vegetation, I instantly felt cured of my city sickness.

Those ten days reminded me of what it felt like to live, in every sense of the word. Not just intellectually, emotionally, or physically; that these states of being are not merely mutually exclusive states of existence. It reminded me what it felt like to be physically drained at the end of the day, to feel like you’ve literally exhausted all your resources. When your feet have been muddy for days, when you can’t run a finger through your hair from transportation solely in the bed of a truck, hair tangled among the salt water, sweat, and dirt, when you fall into bed too tired to change out of your swimsuit, still soaked in salt water by your late night swim, and don’t even remember closing your eyes, despite the shrill of a sea-side thunder storm. When you’ve spent the day aching with laughter, reading until your eyes fall out, voices scratchy from veranda side serenades, remaining shaky hands from waterfall jumping, you know you know you’ve lived that day. When you intellectualized poverty and justice, and interpretations of spirituality until your mind spins like a top. When you ran along the Caribbean coast, and lost yourself in your people back home. When one is literally, utterly SPENT, in every sense of the word. Depleted, in the most brilliant way. You know you really lived that day.

Our time in PG was filled with village stays, ocean runs, yoga on the pier, lovely dinners, X-MILK, candle lit conversations, impromptu dance offs, late night swims, rats, water fall jumping, pickup bed transportation, Mayan ruins, stargazing, afternoons existences filled only with reading and napping in hammocks, cooking, and music.

We began the first weekend by going to San Antonio, a small Mayan village an hour outside of Punta Gorda. We had to sleep in an abandoned rectory, which was naturally covered in rat poop, tangible evidence that we were in fact invading their turf. Needless to say, it was only table sleeping for me, as my other community mates fought over the middle spots in a line of bodies across the floor, trying to balance the need for air and space with a desire for protection from scurrying rodents. Needless to say, it was an interesting evening, but its times like those when a little Tylenol PM and generally physical exhaustion are very helpful .

Anyway, that’s insignificant. The village itself was a beautiful scene, a more romantic notion of simplicity and poverty, the type you see on TV, or in photos in National Geographic. Given that, I am delighted that there is a very strong likelihood that I will be able to live there for a couple months next summer during our interim semesters. It would be a wonderful break from the city, a breath of fresh air, an opportunity to learn about a completely different side of Belize. The thought of this potentiality turning into reality makes me giddy. I hope to be proactive in making this happen. Updates will come on my progress.

On the whole, the past two weeks have been an idealistic little existence for me. The rustic nature of PG embraced me and I felt so comforted by the sea, the vegetation, and the seemingly primitive and rural existence of its inhabitants. It’s so interesting to contrast PG with Belize City. Perhaps its utterly useless as in comparing apples and oranges, but it seems to me that I ‘jive’ a lot more with the PG sort of life, with the a quaint little home overlooking the sea where everyone knows everyone. Belize City isn’t an entirely different story, but it lacks the blatant beauty. The city itself seems to be a perfect recipe for intensity: equal parts poverty – a need for more coupled with enough development and progress to make it happen, in any way you are able. Does that make any sense?

Anyway, being in PG was literally my little utopia, my ideal notion of what life can be and should be. But at the same time I must remind myself that our existence there wasn’t a real life, it was still orientation, life without workloads, deadlines, STRESS. But I can’t help but think that perhaps I’d still thrive there a great deal more, that the ocean and the small, simple town itself would sustain me, would encourage me to live the type of life that I crave.

Part of me wanted to hide in the cabinets yesterday when the bus left, to have to be pulled from the front railing with lifeless arms, kicking and screaming my way to the bus stop, but I knew that I had to go. That this paradise was not life, but the exception, one which I am grateful to have nearly, hopefully never to be taken for granted, with the potential for a quick get away when I need quiet and greenery. It’s only a bus-ride away – a beautiful one.

Perhaps it wasn’t just PG itself, but the place that I was internally while I was there. I accomplished so much mentally. I was able to sort out my feelings about these two years, set explicit goals, and abstract ones; to wrap my head around structures and ideals, to attempt to understand community dynamics, to break down my motivations and needs. I was present, in as much as I could be, without taking away from REALLY living. I initially left Belize City feeling defeated from the city after only a week. My time in PG sustained me, but more importantly, I hope that I learn to appreciate both ends of the spectrum, the simplicity and calmness of PG, and the liveliness and intensity of Belize City.

I understand that my elusive description of Belize City thus far has left many confused. My meager, failed attempts are admittedly inadequate, therefore I leave you with the following excerpt from Bruce Barcott in “The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaro: One Woman’s Fight to Save the World’s Most Beautiful Bird.” Barcott does an excellent job of articulating what I can’t; he captures the energy of the city beautifully, painting a picture with firm, bold strokes.

“If you feel a need to escape the law, elude creditors, hide assets, or shed the skin of your humdrum life, you could worse than run away to Belize…it’s firmly attached to Central America but considers itself a Caribbean island, like a chicken that thinks it’s a duck.

It’s difficult to overstate the smallness of the place. Imagine a country the size of Massachusetts with the population of Corpus Christi, Texas. Give it an army of seven hundred soldiers and a seat in the United Nations and you start to get an idea of Belize. Centuries ago more than one million Mayan populated this part of Central America. Today fewer than three hundred thousand Belizeans spread themselves among the country’s river towns and tin-shack villages. Two-thirds of the country is covered by jungle.

Belize goes unnoticed by the rest of the world, and over the years the country has parlayed its obscurity into an attractive asset. For those shipwrecked on the shoals of life, Belize offers a new beginning. The country teems with adventurous refugees who’ve set up shop in the middle of the Central American jungle. British innkeepers, Mennonite farmers, Chinese shopkeepers, Lebanese entrepreneurs, American missionaries, Canadian aid works, and Dutch scientists live peacefully alongside the nation’s longer established residents, the Garifuna artists, Maya cacao growers, Mestizo plantation managers, and Creole politicians who make the majority of the country’s population. Belize draws the eccentric, the madcap, and the downright mad.

I made my way by rental car to Belize City, the nation’s largest city and notoriously dangerous cultural capital. The sign on the outskirts of the town read BELIZE CITY, POPULATION 70,000. WORKING FOR A BETTER CITY. Founded 350 years ago in a mosquito-ridden swamp near the mouth of the Belize River, the city exists because seventeenth-century sea merchants found it a convenient spot to anchor while loading timber. Today Belize City is a teeming town of stilted wood houses pinched together along narrow broken streets just inches above sea level. The land is so saturated that the dead lie entombed in surface vaults at the edge of town.

I turned on the radio. “No suspect has been identified in the pedal-by shooting that left one man dead in Belize City yesterday….” I switched off the radio and took in the scene around me. Uniformed school children walked the curb. Stately black women crossed the street holding umbrellas like shields against the sun. Shirtless men in long dreadlocks wove their bicycles along street side fruit vendors. Deep gutters and open canals crosshatched the city, filled with turbid waters and menacing, well-muscled crabs.

The streets of Belize City are laid out like a tangle of snakes. Most are unmarked. There is no commercially produced map, although a crude letter-size rendering of the city’s layout circulates around the city like tourist samizdat. I cut across a canal, caught a whiff of its stink and turned left, scanning for a street sign. An old man with gray dreadlocks wandered into the middle of the street, barked something hostile, then continued on his way. I tugged at my shirt, sodden from the tropical heat. Another turn. Didn’t I just cross this bridge?

As the evening sun fell into the sea, I strolled around a peninsula jutting into the warm Caribbean sea. Above me frigate birds spread their great wings and rode the wind to distant homes in the cayes, the tiny offshore islands that form the Western Hemisphere’s largest barrier reef. Belize has a strong relationship with the sea. In proclamation and lore, Belizeans are forever declaring their love for the Caribbean. In Belize city, which is dominated by the descendents of black Caribs, to be Belizean is to be Caribbean. The national antherm hails Belize as the “land of the free by the Carib Sea.” Yet when it comes to the sea itself, the Caribbean is merely the place where the city ends. It’s less a shoreline than a giant curb. Again and again I tried to walk the land’s margin and failed. The sidewalk disintegrated into jagged concrete. A skim of plastic bags, used condoms, and empty bottles floated on the tide. Foamy gutter runoff streamed around breakwater boulders. I kept to the shore until I was stopped by a fence topped with razor wire. I cut back to the hotel through a rusty playground.

Back at the Chateau, I rinsed off the days’ sweat and fell into bed. In the middle of the night I rose from a fitful sleep and switched on the light. The room stayed dark. I tried another light. It didn’t work either. I turned over and went back to sleep. In the morning I awoke to find both lights burning.”

Given that, and my time spent thus far in the city, I have to accept its reality as a sometimes dangerous, challenging environment, especially for a young girl from the states. But also that it has so much to teach me so much about safety, navigation, about fear and false confidence, about learning and needing to see beauty in a place that sometimes seems outright beauty-less. It forces one to seek the moments, the individuals, the interactions, rather than the bigger picture of a month, a week, or even an hour…

It makes me think about time versus moments, and how many truly special moments comprised my time in PG, that filled the hours and time. It made me draw on a quote from a book I read while at orientation. It reads…

“That night I realized that time can be conceptualized in different ways and that it can be stopped and expanded into something grander…Just as with energy, time can be both a wave and a particle, something continuous and something discrete. My idea is that moments are discrete time, complete in themselves and utterly distinct from the habit-bound wave time in which we all live much of our lives. While minutes are earthbound and can be measured, moments both emerge with eternal time and exist outside time altogether.
-Mary Pipher


Anyway, moving on…Communication with home is significantly more difficult than I had thought. The whole idea of e-mail is daunting, especially when one is only able to check their e-mail roughly once a week. It makes me long for communication existing solely in the form of letters, though I understand that other people don’t have the luxury of free evenings and weekends during which I can spend the entirety of my time filled with writing love letters back to the states. I know that I must be respectful of other people’s time and energy and that often times e-mail is simply most efficient - to remind myself that real life is going on back home. The 9-5, deadlines, stressors, anxiety, and the like. I must remind myself there’s a world outside of these eleven individuals in this odd little country, of our little world which I already feel lost inside. I worry that I’ll exist in some sort of bubble with a thick, waxy exterior, which takes a knock from a friend at home, or someone in my community to crack me back into reality.

My most important hope for these years is to balance and more importantly respect my relationship to and with home. When I was in Ecuador, I became far too tangled up in home, in relationships, in familiarity, which often resulted in knots, in incongruencies between my presences in both places. One can’t be fully present, and give themselves fully to both places. It is a delicate art, which I know I’ll never master; my only hope is for some sort of balance and stability. To give my sense of home, and those who fill that word, all the respect, support, and love I can muster out of me. I know I still carry every one and thing from ‘home’ and every other place that has filled me up, that I belong to them, and they to me - that they are laced up in this experience, as tight as I can pull. But at the same time, I also feel compelled to give this experience every last trace of my attention. To give this opportunity the dedication it deserves, for the fundamental privilege that comes with one being able to volunteer. A poem (well, a part of it) has really resonated with me lately and the notion of leaving familiarity, of people, but also feeling such ease here….

Song of the Open Road
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill’d with them; and I will fill them in return.

-Walt Whitman

Anyway, I undoubtedly feel most connected to home when I go for runs, especially in the mornings - more than e-mails, pictures, phone calls, and even videos. I’ve never felt this conscious when I’ve exercised before. I’m so much more present and emotionally deliberate with my time; I get mentally lost on my runs, in people, in places. Especially in the morning, I can picture so many people (except for Jess – and it’s killing me!) in their morning routine, in their natural environment: the office, rolling out of bed, in coffee shops, classrooms, or perhaps, playing with trucks in pajamas while munching on dry cereal with cartoons in the background– oh how I miss my summer mornings ). I feel so present with them somehow. I can feel our existences interlaced almost more than I do when I’m mere hours, or states away from them. It’s interesting how by being so far away, one can still be more present than they had been even when one is in the same room. It is in those moments that I revel in their existence and feel that I’m with them. Then there’s the little moments of connection that shake me up, that can’t help but make me smile at the thought of them.

As evidenced by…
On the bus ride back from Punta Gorda today, a young woman arrived on the bus when we stopped in Dangriga, she came and sat right in front of Patrick and I. I gasped (dramatically) when I realized that she was holding the book “Grace for the Moment” by Max Lucado, a book my dad has had in the counsel of his car for the past two years, at least - book that is inherently part of his morning routine, as much as breakfast at HyVee or running the Bailey and Gracie - a book that he often encouraged me to ride when I climbed up into his truck, only to be exchanged with a look of eye rolling and sighing (but I usually did eventually appease him).

But as I sat behind this young woman, I couldn’t help but think about my dad reading that very book that morning, most likely before 7 am church. I politely asked the young woman if I could read the page for today. She keenly obliged. As I read the page marked August 23, 2009, I felt so fused with home, to my dad in that instant; it is those moments that are reminders of home and comfort, of connection in the small things – even miles, countries, seemingly worlds away, that make me feel alive – and remind me of how connected I really am to home, more so that I truly understand.

I understand that the longer I’m away from home, and the more disconnected I feel, I will inevitably become resentful of this place, the heat, the bugs. But I must remind myself of the way that I feel right now – that can’t imagine being anywhere else these next two years, doing anything else. I have such a strong sense of excitement and enthusiasm, some sort of understanding, though foreign, of how formative these next two years will be for me. Truth be told, I’d probably be happy anywhere, but this specific environment, these people, this country, all making up this delicious experience…I literally have no desire to BE anywhere else.

So much so that I feel comforted by the placement of the little things – like the fact that I’ve been longing for a silk robe for the past two years. Upon exploration of my room here, I found an oversized men’s silk pajama top. I wear this to bed every night. It makes me happy. Is that utterly ridiculous and silly? Absolutely. But it makes me feel comforted here, like I’m somehow designed to be in this little room, in this little fortress among the shacks in the city, in this little Caribbean country, in the Southern hemisphere. And hey, whatever makes me feel at home, right?

Speaking of which, this notion of simple living puts an entirely new perspective onto life. It shakes you up, strips things down, and almost forces you to get off on the small things in life. I think I may be most excited about this tenet of JVI, about what it has to teach me, how it will challenge me, and the way it will in which it will fundamentally affect the rest of my existence. It is interesting, though, how pervasive the notion of simplicity really is in our lives, from the meals we eat, our drinking water we get that falls from the roof of our house, our activities, our purchases (or lack there of), and especially the difficulty of keeping travel within the boundaries of our stipend (which frustrates me).

Living in this environment, I have to admit, is stirring up my mind, a lot. I say this with an understanding that I’m still in my ‘honeymoon stage’ of culture shock (though I despise being labeled as such. Yeah, it’s the 4 in me. Damn Enneagram). So anyway, take it for what its worth, but where I’m at now, where my mind constantly finds itself is lost in the future and my longing for a radical, fundamental life change. I feel like for the past few years I’ve accomplished so much in my realm of “nots” – of, “I know I don’t believe in this behavior, lifestyle, idea, but I think so much is going to develop in what I believe to be true, about what I want, what I seek, what I truly know to be right in the world. I’m going to truly start the process of understanding my own path, what I truly want out of existence, and what the fundamentals are to achieve it all. My fear is that this change will be so radical that others would oppose, will lack understanding, and condemn me for a desire to life a certain sort of lifestyle, a certain type of being.

I know I still have a lot of discernment on my course, in a balance of service and living, and yet again, Barcott articulated it far better than I am able. His words (and everything else) makes me question my previously held beliefs about power, and education, and service. I do know that I want social justice to be fundamental to my existence-that’s its already quite literally intertwined with my being, and I don’t foresee it ever coming untangled. The path through which I will be most effective, however, is still unknown. This quote makes me question previously held axioms, and wonder where my truth lies.

“At times the earth’s fate seems so dire and inexorable that I’m tempted to throw up my hands and say to hell with it. The forces driving the sixth extinction possess so much money and power that fighting them requires a willing suspension of disbelief. The odds are so long that if you look at them too hard you’ll lose your mind. Every once in a while, though, I meet a rare subspecies of human who offers hope. It’s almost never a politician or a scientist. It’s almost always a woman without credentials. They’re often self-taught researchers who become experts through years or hard experience and close observation. They’re the ones who scoop up a jar of brown water from a ditch and ask impertinent questions about what’s in it. Because they don’t know protocol they barge in and do what nobody else has the courage to do. They don’t ask permission. When government authorities demand to know what gives them the right to speak, they don’t flash advanced degrees. They straighten their shoulders and say, I have the right because I walk on this early and I breathe this air.”


As I read through this and am about to save it on my jump drive and take it over to post it on my blog, I laugh at how much my head is already spinning, how many goals, how many admittedly overly ambitious ideas I have in my head, and how I haven’t even had my first day of work yet…..

I want to apologize for the length and excessively detailed nature of my blog this time around, but I also know that you’ll read what you want, with the time you have. I was initially so incredibly opposed to the concept of a blog, but the idea has grown on me a great deal (obviously). I’ve come to look forward to writing down my thoughts, more than incoherent scribbles in a journal. In being forced to think cohesively, to document the connections I make in my day, week, and month – between my relationships, books, conversation, reflections, and to share them with people I adore and value.

I was initially terrified of my candid feelings being so blatant and public, but I’ve accepted this, and somehow don’t seem to mind how others view or interpret my experience and thoughts. I’m learning to own it, to own myself, my worldview, my ideas, my thoughts, and it’s a lovely place to be.

Anyway, it wasn’t until I began to read “Walden” by Henry D. Thoreau and I discovered a suitably articulate means for why in fact I want to have a blog – and live in general. Why I find it surprisingly liberating and wonderful, and know its ultimately more beneficial and potent than simply journaling.

…because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived…I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

Anyway, life is inevitably beginning to slow down, as our real routines here commenced this morning. I understand life will necessarily become more mundane, more difficult during these next few months, as I ease into work, and begin to feel overwhelmed, limited, and probably quite clueless. But I’m excited to settle down into life, to feel the days pass over me. My biggest fear here is slipping into too strong of a routine, to feeling complacent, to becoming stagnate. It makes me think that perhaps I’ll come to crave those nights when I collapse into bed feeling like this place conquered me, that the only solace I find is in the quote above my bed, in the realization that the only hope lies in tomorrow.