While I Was Away

while i was away, with the net connection down at home for almost two weeks--

i literally climbed and went down three mountains, forded a stream, clung to two mountain walls underneath a cliff, and gingerly stepped through a handmade bamboo foot bridge atop a rushing river below, as i made my way, in by inch, along with my students in our Dynamics of Popular Culture class, to the highway that would take us to the bus back home.

of course, before that, earlier in the morning, on balmy, intermittently rainy and very coooold January weather, on our way to visit and interact with the indigenous peoples' community we were going to, we trudged through seven kilometers of dirt, stones, thorny bushes, fields and mud, mud, mud, all on barefoot, as it was difficult and slower to walk with shoes on, and especially for me when the soles of my rubber shoes gave out early on in the journey. i actually went home sitting on the bus, without shoes on, for the first time in my life!

ooh but what a beautiful, amazing adventure! i was grinning all the way home, along with my students, who were all tired and spent, but happily so.

now i appreciate tufts of grass so much more. heehee. during the journey, especially those dangerous moments underneath the cliffs, the tufts of grass were all that we clung to to keep us close to the wall, without falling off the ledge!

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ive been mainly handwriting on my journal, taking solitude, with my thoughts and feelings... and learning the Timeless ways of loving, and being loved by, M...

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i gorged on a movie marathon binge the other night, watching 4 rented movies straight in one night till 3am-- Awakenings, Sylvia, Les Miserables and South Pacific! : )

also finished a novel, If The Shoe Fits by Rae Ellen Lee, about a reluctant boatfrau and her new marriage and her writing while living with her husband in a sailboat and learning the vagaries of sailing (life? married life?), even as i finish growing through The Passionate Life by Sam Keen

later today, i will be watching Seabiscuit and The Age of Innocence, even as i have Shakti Gawain's Living In the Light, and Jane Smiley's The Age of Grief, as bedtime reading for the coming week or so.

Food for the soul time.

i didn't realize i have been sooo starved!!!

***

two months to go and my year's leave starts. my excitement is still there, bubbling, gurgling, but tempered and sober now with the realization of certain "realities" impinging on the fantasy...

i've been finetuning my budgets, and realized that if we keep the ship tight, the children and i can live comfortably well enough during my leave, if we stay close to the basics, as i forego a year's worth of 20k/month net pay,... just to follow my fulltime creative writing Dream, at last, and see where it leads me.

of course, i can always postpone my leave to the schoolyear after next, and save up some more... but i feel called, drawn, to follow this path now, or never at all.

... i don't know how to describe the feeling exactly... but it feels like "fate" somehow, like i have an appointment with Destiny to keep... now or never.

we will see where this path leads me. i don't see the way clearly exactly. all i know is that this is my Joy, and i trust that whatever happens, the children and i will be alright, if not finer and better than ever before... like we always have, when we just followed our Joys!

God bless us all.