Good and Magnificent

March 7, 2009...
“You have to be willing to take risks,” Nael told me with a playful hint of disdain. I ignored him and continued to carefully withdraw my sure-bet middle cube from the row of three. My face, a wall of focus, gave way to a tiny triumphant smirk. I glanced at Nael, also smirking; at his disapproving, smiling green eyes watching me, before I placed my sure-bet cube on the top of the Jenga tower. Without the minutest physical change in expression, his look became one of defiance. He reached down to the foundation of the tower and removed the last cube vital to its stability. The tower wobbled and taunted me like a proud, remaining bowling pin, unwilling to forfeit victory. And succumb it did not…it swayed and yet stood tall as he placed his defiant cube on top of the stack. Now it was my turn to make another move…

August 4, 2009...
So I am preparing that gray bag to be heavy again; filled with a lot of stuff as I travel tomorrow. (If you are confused, refer to my very first blog.) It's going to be so strange to be back on San Jose Avenue in Burbank. It'll be strange generally greeting people with a hug instead of a kiss on the cheek. And how odd it will be to have hot water at any hour of the day. To be able to flush toilet paper and to be able to eavesdrop with ease. To drink 2% milk again, to walk down the street to the cinema, to drive again. To stop always carrying toilet paper in my purse. To say hello, instead of hola. It’s so incredibly weird to think about those things I was so afraid of in the beginning, when I woke up on January 9th and rode to the airport. The language barrier…missing my familiar warm bed. I’ll be sleeping in that bed again two days from now. And I’m heading to a place where everyone speaks my native language. Yet I feel those same nerves all over again. I’m sure I won’t throw up this time, but I don’t quite know if I’m really ready to leave this world behind.

Nael is right...you have to be willing to take risks. I took a risk coming here. And it turned out to be, without a doubt, the best thing I have ever done.

My life has almost always been a route on a map. But this year, when I went off the page and flew to Perú, everything changed. I stepped through a door, out of a fluorescent lit box with white tile flooring and into a colorful, roofless hallway. The brown, sand floor, the closed birchwood doors which boast of my choices, the backs of my caramel-colored, free hands, are all illuminated by perpetual sunlight. I run my fingertips along the the textured walls as I walk forward with closed eyes, unafraid to trip on anything, only feeling for the next doorway to step through and wondering, like an impatient child, what will be on the other side.

This feels right. It feels like love and breathing and warmth. It feels like the perfect mug of hot chocolate.

But now I am dying to know what comes next. I am hoping and praying that I will be somehow led to the next door or, like a polarized ion, drawn to it; or that it would even just fall on me. I can't say I have ever been this curious about what will come next because, along a route on a map, there is no such potential for the magic I feel awaiting me. I can smell it faintly and feel it lightly blowing back the whispy strands of my hair. But what is it? What's to come? Sometimes I thrive on the suspense and sometimes I just want a brick-solid plan. A what-I-want-and-already-know-I-can-have.

Such a thing does not exist at the moment and I stand frozen in the hall. With the light of the sun warming my face. With the hot mug in my hand, between warm, rich sips.

But certainty and knowing and brick-solid plans aren't the stuff that brought me here. What brought me here was risk. Being willing to be afraid and to take a chance. Being willing to mess up and then learn with the passing of time.

I can be nothing but certain that my next risk will deliver me to another beautiful place. This experience, this venture, has been so much more than I could have hoped for.

It has been Good and Magnificent.

But that's only the beginning.