Back in the Saddle

It's been more than three years since I've posted on this blog. I'm not even sure what brought me back to it this evening, but it was so fun to look back at my posts from Mongolia in 2009. I loved watching the video of Ena and me, sitting in her car, stopped at a green traffic light in UB. It was my laughter in the video - and all my posts - that made me feel nostalgia for being in some place so different from home. The randomness of seeing the world differently and discovering it with new eyes.

I'm sitting on my couch in Denver. It snowed last night - on the 10th of May. I'm headed back to Brazil in less than one month, and I'm also craving more of a change, more discovery, more of the laughter that comes from being somewhere new, where not everything makes sense.

But I've also been thinking about that tension between the never-ending search and with roots. Or, to say the same thing, the opposite way: staying put vs. continuing to explore. Both have virtue. I'm not sure which is right for me. I don't want nor need to intellectualize it. But it's there.

I'm thinking about writing again. Really starting to write. I have a fuzzy idea of a project in mind - a book that would be about some of these questions that I don't have the answers to. And what would be fun for me would be to focus on answering those questions - not in some definitive way, but to understand, get a peek into how various characters - people I encounter who would be so kind to open their worlds up to me - how they live those questions to answers.

I write it now, and it sounds flat. But I think about that short video of inspiration that went around on FB from Ira Glass, which essentially said: we have to suck before we get better.

I like the idea of being me. I like this idea more and more. I know that writing takes work and discipline - I probably don't really know it - but I also know that I like the idea of becoming clearer on the page. Writing what I see; losing the filters, bit by bit. Developing that voice and nourishing myself in the act of connecting to it more and more. It's a selfish act of pleasure; ironically so, because sometimes it can be so hard.

Why does it work that way?