And… I AM BACK!

HI EVERYONE!
I am so sorry for dropping the ball on keeping this blog alive, my apologies; it won’t happen again, I promise, I actually need this thing for my own mental health! I’ve really missed writing, it helps me feel connected to you all, my dearly belovedsJ. The past few months have been a crazy concoction of vacations, visitors, and all consuming graduate school applications. Let’s recap- no electricity, no internet, no peers to commiserate with about how much that sucks. Wth was I thinking??

Many computer crashes, seventeen (this number is REAL) essays, one solid panic attack, a million copies of my resume, and a few torn out gray hairs later, I have at least one acceptance letter to show for this bad idea, actually transforming it (miraculously) into a not so bad one, YAY! Hopefully this bodes well for more good news in the future, but I am relieved and thrilled to know that at least I will be going somewhere I want to be come fall, and with the added bonus of never having to examine my background and career goals in 500 words or less ever again.

And where FAFSA killed my desire to participate in the self-important and very expensive institutions that human civilization has created to satiate our intellectual curiosity (sometimes I just wish I had the life of our baby cat, Jambo, the cutest living thing to bless my life so far), vacations and visitors were wholly restorative in reframing my “perspective on life.” That phrase should not really be found in any respected writer’s, or in my case, ANY writer’s, semantic repertoire, but how else can I say it? Embarrassing word choice aside, I have never shifted my paradigm of thought and the way it pertains to our being, so many times, in so short a period of time before.

But if the expanses of the mind could take on a physical being, Victoria Falls would be the place where it happens. Truly the most astonishing and spectacular thing I have ever seen, or more accurately, experienced. I am prone to hyperbole, but it is impossible to exaggerate how magnificent this place is. You know when you watch Planet Earth in high definition on your big screen with surround sound and marvel at the miracles of the natural world? Remove from celluloid and multiply by a factor of ten and that’s still a vague description of how awesome the falls are. An unknown void, a part of my life that I never knew was incomplete has been filled by some exclusively gorgeous and incommunicable thing. Its immense physical scale, sensational beauty, primordial age, were all so wondrous. No matter how you describe it, it can never be over-hyped because its existence transcends linguistic expression, relying instead upon the poetic intricacies of the unspoken and universal language of the soul.

I felt like I was being swallowed up. And that this world, for all its cruelty, treason, and resolute unfairness, is in fact driven by rhyme, rhythm, and reason. Perspective, before just a banal noun, after was transformed into the truest combination of letters in the English lexicon. Never had I felt so strongly that life on this planet, our one Earth, was a privilege and a responsibility. Why should we ever waste time here? Unhappiness should be made right. We owe it to God, Mother Nature, Xenu (wiki it)…to take care of ourselves, each other, the ground beneath us, and the heavens above.