This story began as most stories do - with a journey from home. A step out into the great wide world. The heroine, seeking self-discovery, was full of dreams and eager for adventure. She wanted to experience life somewhere far from what she knew. But she realized there is a lot she doesn't know. The pursuit of knowledge has always been burning up her spirit. Read. Study. Listen. Watch. Learn. Absorb.
I don't want to say that I found myself. I don't want to say that I was ever really lost. But now that I am going home I feel like I'm returning to more than just a place. I don't know everything but I learned a lot these past six months. I know myself much better than before which is to say I know myself significantly better than before because I always thought I knew myself pretty well. Does that make sense? I also have a better idea about what I want.
So, I am standing on the verge of another journey. The return journey. My skin is a little thicker. I have some battle scars. Some amazing tales never made it onto this blog. But isn't that how it usually goes? Most of the time I feel like my words are inadequate in relaying my experiences. My thoughts. My joy. My sadness. My desires. It would be impossible for me to share everything with you. But there are scenes from movies or passages in books that precisely convey what is rumbling about in my heart. Or head. Or a combination thereof. If you've been reading you'd understand me when I say that I have an affinity for The Wizard of Oz. I watched it a lot as a kid. So much that when I watched it yesterday it felt like déjà vu. I loved it before I ever lived in Kansas.
I leave the Netheralnds tomorrow, if all goes as planned. Like I said, my adventures are far from over. I'll continue to update here about the reverse culture shock and what not. Since I can't really put into words what I am feeling at this very moment about this very moment and concerning the culmination of the past six months, I'm including a few quotes I've collected:
•"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream." -Mark twain
•“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
-Marcel Proust
•“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – It’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” - Jack Kerouac
•“Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.” -Milan Kundera
•"So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness."
-Hermann Hesse
•"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
•"No creature is fully itself till it is, like the dandelion, opened in the bloom of pure relationship to the sun, the entire living cosmos." -D.H. Lawrence
•"And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it." -Roald Dahl
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