I started this blog four years ago.
I had big dreams of gazing distant lands, indulging in the human experience, and funneling through my own fears in a way that would feel victorious.
I spent a solid year digesting the world in a way I know best—through words and photos. As I transitioned off the trip and fumbled to find my own footing, I lost a lot of time for digestion. Time for arranging words shrunk as I focused on how to sustain a life and how to turn my life into a dream. As I climbed Maslow's hierarchy of needs, years slipped through me. I would find myself on flights, shuffling through everything that didn't fit in my iCal. Sometimes words would flow, sometimes they would rush, and often my leaky faucet would leave me swollen in my seat. I'd have to put the pipes back together just tight enough so that when the plane would land, my plumbing could carry me to my next adventure with little drips.
This worked pretty well for awhile as I was building and balancing on steady ground. I'd pack my travel-size buckets and catch the droplets before my pipes got too rusty.
But cut to four years later and my plumbing is starting to calcify.
With my father's recent passing, people from my past resurfaced and I welcomed the trickling in. People whom I loved/love who have known me as a child, a teenager, and a twenty-something trying to find my place all caught me when I was falling to pieces. These are all people who know me in a way that only an old sweater would. They know my rough spots, soft spots, they know the way I curve and how to hug my body. They protect my vulnerabilities and truly know my flesh in the barest of ways. Many of them kept asking me the same question:
"Are you writing?"
It's as if they all knew my path to healing has always been through words. Every time I would be asked this question, my gut gargled. "Why aren't you writing?" I'd ask myself. Has my hand atrophied too much to lift a pen? Maybe I feared that it wasn't my hand but my head that had gone limp. Before I sat down to write this, I had sat down several times with pen, paper, and a heavy head and heart and nothing would spring from my hand. Perhaps that's how grief works or how mourning manifests—through fits and starts.
So as I find myself in new territory—living in the absolute absence of another, I can only imagine moving through the thick of these muddy waters one word at a time. Using them as paddles to reach shore when I feel like I'm drowning, or to reach an island when I need refuge.
This blog's motto has always been "Live Big," and that also means wide. It means that life is a spectrum and it isn't always so sweet. Life is beautiful but it also has a bite. It's only through each chew that we can digest and recycle pain to convert it into energy to move forward. This blog and these posts going forward will be my bites toward healing and nurturing the parts of me that I've forgotten about along the way.
As I continue to live a somewhat nomadic life, this will be my home, my safe space to release whatever it is that is building up within.
I will explore experimentation and share this personal journey to find beauty in darkness, find light in mourning, and sweetness in my sorrow.
Where there is pain, I will create, I will make, I will fill my empty.
Just watch, Dad.