Lost in Language

There are times when life appears to mimic literature and as you move through your own passages now stumbling, now wandering, now dancing: motifs and themes begin to appear in the scenes. It makes me think of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a book whose ideas and thoughts I adore and run through in my mind over and again. Who is to say whether it is our noticing and noticing again of random events which give them their significance, or whether we notice the event of them because of their significance? Which comes first and in the end does it matter? (I think that yes, it does matter, because there is a certain amount of power involved and one way gives us more power, the other less. But that is all beyond the point of thought I am following tonight.)

For the last many days, I have been thinking of language. What am I saying? For the last many years, the last decades of a life that only does have a few decades, I have been thinking of language. And now my critical thesis revolves around language and my dreams focus on language and my insecurities stem from language.

I am working on the idea of code switching in language right now, a study which seems terribly overlooked and I am bound to generate far too many pages in my thesis if I do not cut myself off or learn to control my insatiable desire for more, for satisfaction, in this topic. It is a black whole of wondrous exploration at the moment.

The more I explore this idea and try to get inside the concept, the more I find myself surrounded by it every day and moment by moment. Being in this capital city certainly aides that, as I am regularly plunged into other languages on the metro, the streets, and in restaurants. (it is glorious!)

A few weeks ago now, I went out wandering and by a series of spontaneous decisions, ended up at a sushi happy hour. No sooner did I sit than I noted that the gentlemen at the table next to me were speaking English. A moment later, I thought, no, they are speaking Spanish, that's funny. Then it was English again. I couldn't figure out which language they were actually speaking (was it English or Spanish, and why was I having this difficulty deciphering which--it must be Spanish if I am thinking about it in English concernedly?) until finally they started switching back and forth between them--one in English the other in Spanish and then one in Spanish-English, the other in English-Spanish. We ended up talking after I could no longer not-listen and not-lean in towards them and it was delightful to discover not only fellow South Americans (I claiming that part of my identity) and make new friends, but to be part of what is this idea of code-switching, of moving across the borders of language and culture for various purposes. I had just been thinking about it and then there it was next to me and happening inside of me.

Tonight, getting on the metro for a rather long commute home, I stepped onto a nearly empty train car. I walked up the whole length of it to sit towards the front, where three people in three separate rows where talking across the space--about nothing less than language. About switching between languages and "wearing" accents and putting on culture. Did they know these are the ideas I dream about now at night and in my waking moments? So I listened, and when I started laughing with them, I was officially part of the group. I even moved up a row to sit directly with them. Now we were four strangers (as they were all, in fact, strangers) sitting together and talking language, connected by our Caribbean heritage and our chameleon abilities (or lack there-of). We went our separate ways one by one, saying good night, high-fiving, waving, all smiles. It was fascinating and wonderful and so beautiful it almost hurt me.

I realise I'm not really telling you anything here about code switching. Feel free to research it a little and let me know what you find. I don't think you will find much--I haven't yet (aside from 200+ pages culled out of linguistic, literary, and psychology journals that lightly touch the topic). But I am writing my thesis on it so you can know that you will likely be hearing much much more about it.

Really, I just wanted to say tonight how exquisitely wonderful it was to get on a nearly empty traincar and find myself in the midst of a circle of friends I do not and will not ever know the names of. To step into a basement Japanese restaurant at the edge of Chinatown for sushi happy hour and find friends who know the cities I have walked in and who coax back into my consciousness a language I have only turned over and held in my subconscious for years and years.

These beautiful strangers and these waking dreams and falling back into language are all the reasons I wanted to come back to city, to international life, to this world where by accident I can walk into all the places I know of as home and speak friend.

A Challenge of Imagination

As a temporarily unemployed professional, I have done a lot of thinking about this process of searching for work in which I find myself these days. People ask questions like, "how are you doing,"  or "what sort of work are you looking for," or make comments like, "man, it must be rough to not have a job," or "boy, I sure wish I didn't have to be working, too."

I find that being between work does indeed leave a lot to be desired--security and stability, in sum, not to mention the fact that I happen to love working and really miss it. There are times when the narrow reality of my situation presses in on me and I feel my stress rising; blood in my ears and bile in my mouth. Times when I toss and turn instead of sleep, or when my eyes fly open from a deep sleep back to this waking, unsettling insecurity. Many of those who know me probably also know that for all my adventuring, I do actually like structure in my life and I love to work. This is not an easy experience for me.

What I have come to find when I am not holding onto narrow reality or demanding impossible answers to temporally irrelevant questions, however, is that this place of searching for work is a beautiful place to be. There is always something wondrous in being lost and much of the wonder of that comes in what you find along the wandering way.

I think and talk all the time about translating culture across boundaries, about shape and place and space and being. But how often do I think or take the time to consider the possibility of translating the [non-cultural shape of] myself? Now, every day when I look at job descriptions, I think, Can I do this? Do I want to do this? What skills and experiences would I bring into this? Who are they looking for?

I left the realm of "jobs which I obviously and easily can do" behind weeks ago now, and spend time looking at jobs that I would have said were out of my circle of possibility. I think that is wonderful. Searching for work is teaching me to see myself anew every day, and not only to see myself, but to imagine and to re-imagine myself over and again.

It is like acting in a way, looking at a role and saying, do I have something within me that I can call upon and respond to the call of this character to me? Can I embody this being and be it so well that the crowds roar, that my heart soars, that the integrity of the character is satisfied?

But the fact is, it is not actually acting at all: it is a translating of myself: not an act, but a new form of being. Sure, there is this "one me" with the list of things I have done. But we are not defined--should not be defined-- by what we have or have not done. That is what traps people and creates the silent despair so many people suffer through in their daily lives. That is a form of death, I think.

It is our being which matters, and our being is expansive and ever expanding (I think when our being ceases to expand we are like the dead). Our whole, elastic being contains so much more than simply what has been done, what we have accomplished. We are not wearied check lists buried under dusty stacks on a desk.

One of my favourite historical figures (alas that now I no longer have the possibility of dining with him!) is Vaclav Havel. He wrote, in addition to many other world changing things, this incredible speech about the power of the powerless. The fact is, we all have power; we all participate in the shaping of reality. We can pull out from the realm of imagination and enact; we can expand our being and do differently--challenge ourselves and step outside of what we think is possible to discover the boundlessness of possibility and the feebleness of reality.

It is incredibly uncomfortable to push the edges of reality. I think of my childhood, trying to step into a mirror all the time to find the other world and the frustrations when it would not yield to me. Frustration, disappointment, the risk of feeling one's trappedness or smallness after all. But fear is the worst possible jailor, and I refuse to put myself in shackles. If there will be shackles in my future, they will not be because I held out my wrists meekly or shackled myself fearfully. Fear is what keeps us powerless. Fear is what keeps us going in a dead end job because we are too afraid to re-imagine ourselves in a new life, in a new world. Fear is what confines us to one possible reality. Fear is what never lands on the moon.

Imagination is not child's play in the grown up world, but maybe if we exercised it more, or if we played harder and dared longer, we could grow into it again. I do think for many people, there comes a time when we have left the imagining and re-imagining of ourselves and possibilities so long in the past that we no longer know how to do it. Perhaps we no longer know how to see ourselves at all or are afraid of what we will see when we do simply look in that mirror. Not even that should stop us, though; search out your muscle memory, try and try again.

I know that right now, far beyond the discomfort and the instability, I just love this idea that I could be and try so many different things. I am discovering jobs, lifestyles, endless universes I did not even know existed! And when I look at myself in light of those possibilities, I see there on the other side of the mirror myself, smiling back.

Exploring. Becoming anew. It is spectacularly freeing and empowering. Expanding the universe of self.

Right now we are reading in my workshop here at residency this book called 19 Translations of Wang-Wei. It is based on this one, 4000 something year old ancient Chinese poem that has been translated and retranslated throughout history. Every version of it still is itself, but new and delightful and rediscovered. I want to be that poem. I want to be fully myself, with so many facets that I sparkle like the most gorgeous diamond in the world. That some intrinsic intricate part of me resonates wherever I go and echoes still in my absence, touching and changing and challenging the world. And I cannot wait to find this next translation of myself to fully step into and develop.

I think everyone should join me in taking on and enjoying at least one of these actions this year

identify your fears and embrace at least one of them
take a long look at yourself--all of you, the whole entire beautiful wondrous and terrifying essence of your being--and then re-imagine yourself in some way

I'd add at the end of both of those, "be different," or "be re-imagined," but the fact is, I think if any of us try any of these things, that will be the result no matter how small or large that difference seems at first. We are not dead; we are gloriously alive. And since we are alive--living matter, breathing being--we can shape and reshape and expand ourselves to encompass possibilities we can (or cannot yet!) only dream about right now.

Rubbing Stars

"To live without roads seemed one way

not to get lost. To make maps

of stone and grass, to rub stars together,

find a spark." 

~from "Spark," a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye

Sometimes it is in the wandering that we find ourselves in the most perfect of places. 

Just now, I am curled up on a couch in the lounge of a college in Vermont, happily tuning in and out of conversations around me; tuning in to hear discussions of publishing, of writing styles, point of view and audience. Tuning out to reflect on the day, on the last few days, on the end of last year. Last year when I came to this place of wonderfulness at the very end and after too long in transit. Tuning out to think of the next few days and the future smiling at me. 

To settle back into a small city, even if just for this period of 12 days, is beautiful. Walking everywhere--20 minutes down a slushy slide of a road to the downtown, dumptrucks loaded with snow driving past, clearing the way. On either side of the main streets quaint shops, local and proudly green or organic or handmade all. Espressos in honey-wooden rooms, crepe cafes and mad tacos and the most alice-in-wonderland sort of thrift stores. A sweater I have hunted for 8 years! Late night viewings of Les Miserables with my roommate at the old cinema by the capitol building and a taxi ride back through the night. 

Engaging in lectures on all sorts of wonderful subjects; of craft and of creation, of theories and possibilities and fascinations of all kinds. Readings that make you hold your breath, unable to breathe for the beauty of the words, of the particular arrangement of those precisely chosen words one after another in art and in meaning (and are those the same, afterall?). Losing yourself in workshops; reading and thinking and sharing--this wonderful back and forth--dialogue to take a work from what it is to even better; to impossibly better. Beautiful.

I love the new faces, the new stories, the new friendships being made. The fact that this place is obviously a community that exists across space and regardless of this particular place; the understanding so crystalline that when we leave this particular here we will still be together talking and sharing and exchanging. Pushing and encouraging each other and continuing these dialogues. Continuing this lovely engagement. To not only go out with a group of friends, of fellow students, but with professors you cannot wait to work with; have so much to glean from. 

I love that in all my wandering without roads, I am found here, in this perfect place. Ready to wander some more, ready to make maps of stone and grass and to find a spark--to make a spark. To write. 

Bellydancing and Translation Lessons

When I first packed up my beautiful apartment of the last five years--five years!!--I knew I had chosen to enter a season of suffering in some form. I remembered from growing up and studying across four fascinating continents that every change of place and abrupt altering of routine means not only exquisite adventures, but also ache and longing. It is the great dichotomy of my life; this love and hate of movement.

It has been two months now since my arrival in this city--it is in fact my seventh capital city in which I have resided in some measure of permanence rather than transience. I love it and frequently wonder why and how I lived so long in a rural area before coming back to a place that plays like music through my being, though I know the answers well and do not regret the choice.

In addition to glorious happiness, however, has been the pain. Firstly, people--people whom I grew to know and love over the years and expect to see every day, many times a day, on weekends. Fixtures in my life whom I must now live without their promise of regularity. People whom I miss dearly, who are now added to the Hall of Wonderful People I Have Known Around The World.

Past people comes everything else. The learning how to live and be and move in a new place. Building your reputation anew. Learning the culture and choosing what to embody and what to find a way around. Deciphering the webs; transportation networks, organization networks, friend networks, job networks. Where the best coffee is and how a dishwasher works. How you cannot get a post office box without a signed lease or car/home insurance or car/home ownership papers. How to calculate risk. How to write cover letters and obtain interviews and listen and talk. How to introduce yourself--here that experience is so different than the introduction of myself I have shaped the last five years. Here I am learning myself anew and determining what facets of myself to show and what to tuck away.

When I first came here, and found no one to smile back at me, no one I knew to feed me a hug or wish me good day; when I had no job to learn and no work to pour myself into, I found myself fading in shadow. I jokingly say to friends I am like a dementor (Harry Potter reference, if you don't know), feeding off the souls of others. (Don't worry, it's not quite like that...) In order to hold onto myself, I decided I needed to find a way to connect. For the record, connecting in a city is significantly easier than connecting in a rural area. All I had to do was chose what to connect with and decide it was monetarily an affordable investment. I chose: bellydancing.

Now bellydancing immediately afforded me a number of things: my first friends, my first group (think of this as a circle of people to come home to in a way), positive endorphins from the exercise, a reason to get out, discipline, and something wondrously fun and new. It was a perfect choice. The learning of bellydancing has also paralleled my own experiences moving here.

You start out simply, moving your body in ways that make you laugh, moving your body in ways that are so basic you think, that's it? really? But then as you continue learning, you discover some of the moves require you to forget muscle memory; that the particular muscle you are trying to use for a move is the wrong one; you need to forget it, and you need to learn to move all over again through a different muscle. The differentiation is fine, but significant. You also begin to discover muscles you never knew existed. I had no idea about some of the ones the teachers tell me to use. "You need to use this muscle, here," they say, pointing to a place on their belly that moves. I look at myself and try to move that area. Nothing. "Um, I don't think I have muscle there," I say, sheepishly, trying again. "Oh no, you do! You just aren't used to moving it!" And we all laugh. Now my body aches in places I never felt anything before, and the tiniest success I have in making a twitch thrills me. As we have progressed through the class, we have begun layering. Instead of working on just one move at a time, we combine two, or three. It's like on piano, the first time you play with both hands, and then the first time you play two different, complimentary notes on those two hands.

And it is exactly like starting out in a new place. You are back in many ways to the basics, to one step at a time and it feels so elementary it makes you angry at times. Things you should be able to do, or to handle, that you just cannot. How some things you did before still need doing, but with a tweak. You have to forget the old way and teach yourself the new. I feel as though after two months here, I am finally starting to find some of these new muscles, to reteach some of the old muscles, and to tap into muscles I used to use back in the day, when once before I lived in cities and capitals around the world, though never as an adult and professional.

So many new things.

Which brings me to translation. This is certainly something that I know a great deal of. How many languages have come through my ears? How many cultures and idioms? I remember in college days, I was still troubled by this idea that I had to be all of one thing and that meant none of another. For those like myself, global citizens and nomads, to deny one of our cultures in order to be fully the other is sto destroy or anihlate part of ourselves. A sort of ethnocide of self. But we just need to learn how to translate ourselves from one culture into another. We will pick up things, as actors keep a piece of every part they play, and we take all of these things and translate them throught the cultures in which we live and move. It is beautiful. It is a work of art. And like a baby growing up, it is the most natural thing in the world.

Just a Day's Reflection

One of the things I have long loved about city living is the anonymity, and more particularly; finding within the anonymity your common humanity with the strangers around you. In my current employment, I get to interrupt the lives of people rushing past me, seeming to see only the next thing on their list, the lineup of their day, a driving goal they must reach in time. I interrupt them and speak for those who cannot, working for the chance to be heard and to connect them with someone completely outside of their world. Interrupting other people's lives is fascinating; watching the effect of these encounters on my life is no less so.

Today I met a man from the Czech Republic. It was so much fun to get to speak with him in a mixture of Czech, Slovak, and English. Earlier in the morning I met a man and stumbled through a brief conversation with him in Spanish. It was like dragging words out of a dream for me, so long since I have used that mind and tongue. I love that I can find here people in whom I can find an echo of life I know, but whose personal experiences in life are so incredibly different than my own.

I spoke with one gentleman today, a friendly and brief exchange that made me smile--only to have him come back an hour or two later and blame me for losing him a contract. He spoke hatefully, commenting derogatorily on my appearance, tearing apart our conversation from earlier and it was shocking to see the transformation. I lost him nothing, in all honesty. I was a scapegoat to his bad morning and nothing else, but watching him rage there at me, at my coworkers, at the man whose conversation with me he interrupted--it was sad. It was as though he was dismantling his humanity and baring beast teeth and no one was impressed. "He is a sick, sick man," someone commented to me, shaking his head and then apologizing to me for what the man had said. "Don't you listen to that man. And you're beautiful, don't even think about what he said."

I hope I will never see that man again. I struggled with anxiety the rest of the day, wondering if others I meet would be like him, wondering if the whole world is like him, wondering what hope we have for ourselves when in reaction to our own disappointments we go out and deliberately crush and attempt to humiliate those surrounding us, people who are our neighbors for a second and our fellow humans for our lifetime. I wonder what it was he was hoping for and why his disappointment so devastated him; is his mind already sick, or did he have so much hinging on this one possibility that the disappointment of loss maddened him and lost him to himself?

The rest of my day was filled with fascinating encounters; a man who was homeless and on the streets at fifteen and sixteen who is now passionate about helping homeless children. My Slavic smile of the day. People who love to travel as much as I do, who love people and hold hope for humanity. Riding home at the end of the day, I saw a woman wearing a Santa Claus hat with "Bah Humbug" on it (like one I own but alas, is in storage this year). She sat down behind me on the metro and I turned and asked her about her hat--resulting in our chatting the rest of the ride to my stop. We just talked about Christmas, about giving gifts to our friends, about our families and life. It was beautiful.

Here in this city, there is so much opportunity to do things and so many people who like me, come from all over the world. I am reminded often of my days studying in London, when I first felt as if I could be in one place and experience all of my homes again. I love it. Walking home tonight, I stopped first at the grocery store and then wandered back laden down with oranges and wine and firewood and I was just overwhelmed with how completely happy I am to be here, in this city, in this place and time despite all the difficulties, despite the upheaval of perpetual transition, despite the continual unknown. I think how many things I am going to have learnt at the end of this, and I find myself slowly adapting to the continual feeling of being off kilter and unsettled. Though I have only been in this apartment now for a week and my room is a disaster zone, I can call it home and feel at home.

I am so excited for the perpetual possibility here for involvement and the motion picture of humanity playing around me every day and bumping into me. These make it possible to dream, and wondrous
 to exist as a being. So here's to humanity, and to possibility to renew and transform ourselves and the world around us even one small moment at a time.

Moving Pictures: A Motion Study

I am sitting today outside a Starbucks, ostensibly to take time out from writing job applications to write stories, to create outside of my life through the experiences in my life. That is something I deeply love about this idea of writing fiction; that it gives me the opportunity to be greater than the simple sum of my parts by leaping into the vast sea of humanity and the human experience: a dissolution of self into so much more.

But right now, everything in my immediate life is so intense and vivid that it overwhelms, that I jump off the diving board into the recesses of my mind only to be brought back up again by another wave of my reality, another pressing thing I need to do or consider.

Moving, I think, to a new location takes hardly anything at all. You simply go from point A to point B. To make a successful transition, however, that takes so much more. There are things to do:
--Get a new address
--Update your address with every subscription, card, service, membership organization, and friend. (That, by the by, takes not one, but more like four hours, and may need repeating should the post office reassign your box)
--Find new hangouts where you can be refreshed
--Create a new health routine to suit your new situation and schedule
--Build a new social network
--Find out how to integrate your past social network into your new situation and schedule. Because while you can cut off your friends and end relationships when you move from A to B, why would you? Friendships are those things which ought to be able to not only rise above circumstances, but circumference  differences and changes and geography. They may need reimaging and reimagining, but they are such a beautiful and wonderful and vital part of our lives. I would not be quite myself, this self, without the friends who have poured their lives into me through the years.

There are things required:
--courage to explore and find these new things
--boldness to accept an image of yourself that you may not feel confident in, but wish to move forward through: the sort of idea where you step into a pair of shoes which are too big for you and find that they give you the space to grow into them and expand your being
--energy to try and try again, or to step a little further, or to again wake into a day that is full of the unfamiliar, that brims over with strangeness; that has little or no comfort zone for you to curl up in and hide away within
--forgiveness of your mortality, of the humanity of yourself. Of the fact that you love having your life filled with people that you love, people you have gotten to know through the years starting with a smile at a stranger or a hello, and then built into the regular features of your life and now have to live without that regularity. Now have to start with ten million new smiles and hellos to a small ratio of returns
--joy that you get to have this. That you get to wonder and wander and try and try again. That you get to meet SO MANY NEW PEOPLE every day and you never know who might become wrapped into the future of your life, what might come next, what to expect at all
--a vision that helps you see how the many pieces of your life are not, or need not be, fragments. How they may all be so different and even clashing but still have worked to make you yourself--and in that way of being your self, you make all of them one and whole and not broken fragments at all. And this vision helps you with grief, because you know that what was still is, and what will be already is beautiful for that, too.

Wandering last week around Portsmouth (Pronounced "port's-muth"), Maine, I found my eye captured by this beautiful combination of colours; a yellow on a blue. It was just simply these beautiful berries of yellow and orange against the backdrop of the stony blue sea and I was swept away with the thought--my room at home (now gone), where i painted blue sea and stony sky and curtained rising yellow light from my childhood. That room is not lost for being gone; those colours are something I carry with me, carry everywhere. The splashes of what and who we love, of the tiny things which shape us echo about us, everywhere and always. Even when we are quite alone or cut off and apart from the particularity of what shaped us, their resonance remains, sounding like a song through our lives, note after note of meaning winding together and creating this most beautiful harmonic and perfectly unique piece which we play out.

I am reminded here in DC of how I first fell in love with London: it was the first place I had been to, since discovering that life can shatter us or give us the experience of fragmenting, where I felt whole and complete. Where I could walk around the city and hear languages in all my tongues . Where I did not need to choose between what part of my life was real and what might not be or had no space to be. Here in DC, I again hear so many languages, the ones I know. German, clearly from Vienna, speaking, and I remember riding around on the u-bahn going to and from school. The laughter and the homework and and the beautiful long trips. I bought these recycled beer earrings off a Kenyan man in the market Sunday afternoon. With him I got to connect and talk about Kenya, about the places one should see there and what did I see while there? And I thought, how funny it is that when I first travelled to Kenya, I  never imagined that this "insane adventure" would echo so far into my future as to be part of my most solid reality.

Vertigo affects some people; I for one am deeply affected by it. I look over a cliff's edge and I experience motion. I struggle going down AND up escalators because the tedious motion of the steps and I think I might faint or collapse from it. This is not an issue of height, but of a particular manner of experiencing motion. Wibbly wobbly bridges. Rope ladders. Ice skates and skis. What I struggle with in moving is perhaps another form of vertigo; of everything being thrown into some strange suspension and this sensation of instability. But I adore the expanding of my universe, and the way that out of place and the definitions we lock onto in our lives, reality becomes reborn and we, with it.

Not All Who Wander Are Lost

It's funny how life happens sometimes. One month ago, I never imagined that today I would be sitting by piles of red rocks staring out across the Atlantic Ocean from a portico on Prince Edward Island--and I have a pretty wild imagination! Yet here I sit, watching the clouds gather grey overhead and the ocean resting so very still. Across the way, the black of trees on an outcropping of land silhouettes itself against blue rolling hills further aback and the blue light falling from the sky beyond and above.
For three years, I have fruitlessly lain plans with friends for roadtrips or plane-trips to this island, and each year they have fallen through; even this very summer! And now without a plan at all, with only a breath and a whim and a great big woosh, here I am.

It fascinates me to think what has been lost and what not? I no longer have a job; but I am still a professional. I no longer have an income, but I'm still existing and doing and eating and going. I no longer have my beautiful, perfect, and first apartment ever; but I have lots of couches and spare rooms and homes opened up to me for a return, for a visit, for a trip home. I am still a student and I am definitely an artist. I'm still a traveler, even if I have to let go of studying in Puerto Rico this winter because I cannot reconcile yet in my mind how do I pay for that when I have no idea of how my living will look? And I am doing and being what I do and know best right now: living a nomad's life and running to the sea. Crying and laughing with friends. Watching, writing, thinking.

I love that I have come to an island to think when I come firstly from an island. I love that the rocks and the dirt (or is it sand?)  hidden here is red-toned, like earth I remember from childhood. I love that I have friends across the world and am never quite gone from home despite being where I have never stepped before.

Though not new to me, it is still odd to think that I will not be "going back" after this adventure. That I will instead be going on to something newer yet, more unknown and that the picture ahead is not littered with the faces and smiles of people I have come to expect to see every day, whom I already miss, dearly. That the picture ahead has very little at all that I can expect to know.

What I do know, though, is that I can read signs. I can get to Prince Edward Island by myself. I have navigated countries not my own, spoken languages I do not know the names of, and have yet to not enjoy an adventure I meet with. I know that I love challenges and that I crave a rawness in life and well, I've certainly got that ahead of me! These are exciting and wonderful times, however strange and hard and tiring they may also feel. This is how I love to live; walking on an unmapped path surrounded by wonder and heading into a great and beautiful mystery I will get to explore and learn.