Writing with A Pen and Paper Again (transfer from leather bound journal from Nicole)

These notebooks are mean to be for entries of travel, and yet I find myself writing already, about the journey starting to take place in my gut, my head, and my heart.

This book is beautiful. I asked for things recycled, used a little, bound frail-y and maybe stained. Books to carry the old fingerprints and pen scratched traces of my friends-I can attempt a home where ever I am, one of walls and street sounds and inclement weather, but ultimately I am nowhere without these people whom I love and whom I hope in many ways that I somehow am.

I told Jeremy today that I've been preoccupied, as it must be for a river nearing spring and its inevitable, slow-coming breakup, freedom and fluidity and movement built up under the surface, nearly broken loose but for a little less night, a little more sun. Change is a force welling up in me as if held back by ice, by the sudden passing of time from one season into another. I hope this propulsion lasts. Joining the Peace Corps is a frighteningly real decision now, but, as I told John (and my mother, and everyone else) it is time for me to do some good in the world outside of myself. As there must always be, of course, I feel a certain level of fear. That is indeed the definition of the sublime: that which moves us to both awe and fear, something so near to divinity and to heaven that we are cowed by it at the same time that it is beautiful.

I hope this is subliminal, for I can think of no better way to experience all the fear and awe in the world, with its terrible and unavoidable and consumptive beauty, than to immerse myself in the grit and richness of men themselves, in their cities and ruins and niches, in places I have never been and to whose people I am a stranger. I hope to work, to become lost in the way the farmer and the architect are, because work is the backbone of civilization. To work is to survive. And I hope to write-something I haven't been doing enough of lately-just as Hemingway and Snyder and Pound did, men immersed so thoroughly in another culture that they could finally begin to see all that was lacking in their own. Radicalism in all its forms has paved so many ways. Gone are the days when one could hop a cargo ship for a few dollars and travel the world, the way they did. Yet at its heart, that which is radical stems from, I think, a deep need to reassert humanity overall, over a situation or a status quo or, more simply, over oneself.

In the most earnest of ways, I suppose, this is at the core of my travels, of what appears to many to be an abrupt change or a flagrantly reckless undertaking. In order to reassert my own humanity, the utter confusion and sheer joy and overwhelming gratitude of it, the thanks one gives when, upon seeing the sun break through the clouds, it becomes apparent that each beam is an equal distance from the other, so that it creates a fence of light, and whether it is to guide us to the gates of heaven or to keep us out, we can no longer tell, and for a while longer we must walk the world, life itself the only way in or out of those gates, or into the sky, or towards ourselves.