Departures & Arrivals

I made it to Spain following about a week in the District, so to speak. My brother and his lady love live in Castellon (Cas-teh-yon) where it is rather gorgeous and mellow. They're teaching English in high schools here, or in nearby towns, And taking advantage of the lifestyle of the sufficiently employed in foreign parts. Their apartment, to say the least, is frigid and it is often slightly warmer--and distinctly sunnier--outside that inside. Tile floors everywhere absorb what little heat gathers from a space heater, and the only time I am particularly warm inside is in a bustling kitchen or steamy bathroom. It is good to be here all the same.

This past week was spent in the company of Miss Linnea McCully in the greater D.C. area. We explored the Terra Cotta Soldiers exhibit from China in the National Geographic Museum, wandered about in the DuPont Circle neighborhood where we ate wonderfully at Teaism--which I highly recommend for tea aficionados in the area--and visited American University with its Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs graduate program. Though it is a bit of a walk from the Metro station, it is a beautiful campus and worth visiting, perhaps waiting for warmer weather would be nice.

More so than when I have visited D.C. in the past, I wished for further and specific company to show up and join me. The Terra Cotta Soldiers reminded me of Miss Leigh Clanton who knows more than a little about the archaeological dig around the first Chinese Emperor's tomb. Teaism recalled a few tea fanatics, including Miss Clanton, but also Miss Lauren Fulner & Miss Haven Davis. DuPont Circle has in the past, and more recently, the company of Miss Anna Tibstra, who would enjoy much of the architecture of cramped streets and campus buildings at American, too.

Which in turn, brings to mind something I said to Miss Linnea. She teaches children in Colombia at present and manifests personally what many of my friends are increasingly all about: personal momentum. So many important people in my life are on the road in their specific ways, discovering certain outer bounds of their worlds. Such is their motion, that I do not doubt them to lose much of it on the way. On the other hand, I am more and more concerned with finding a certain place or world in which to set up walls and set in roots. What I told Linnea, who I expect to continue to work internationally for a good long while (to which I must respond in patience since I cannot respond in frequent flyer miles), was that I expect to be a sort of way-station for many of those wonderful people my life entails. At school and on my recent birthday in Lincoln, I seem to practice a open-home-ness where people rest, converse, recover, bond, build, and share with one another. In part, my passion for food is because of just such an interest in this sort of personal-social construct.

Honestly, I expect to go to graduate school this following fall or the next, complete whatever program I find there, and then stay there or move only once more--preferably the former. Why is this? Well, it has to do with how I want to live my life. I want my life to be tied to a place, to a set of familiar faces and locales, and I want to build a home, a home that extends beyond the walls of a building, but into the soil and lives of others. To do so, and to do so well, strikes me as something that takes a good long while. I am comfortable with this; in fact, it inspires me with comfort. To know a place takes years, if not decades, and I suppose (and I mean that, as an unsupported assumption about myself) this in turn means and contributes to knowing myself.

For the moment, though, I am traveling in my typical wintertime style. In the past, my winters have included India (most recently) and Brazil, with a few brief stops on the way or around them, and there was that January internship in St. Paul, but I don't know if I would normally count that. I am happy traveling and discovering, flexing some Portuguese in to Spanish and learning the roads of a new city; but eventually I am happiest returning to a warm home.