Friday, July 19, 2013

Reach for the Skies


After a 10-hour work day, my feet are swollen, my hands bruised and my back sore...but I'm settled in bed with my favorite celtic band, a bowl of colorful fruit salad, surrounded by wrinkled papers with handwritten notes scrawled across them in countless flurries of ideas and thoughts. I'm trying to create my own major and the effort is both invigorating and daunting. I love the freedom I'm allowing myself, the ability to customize my studies into a perfect culmination of passion, knowledge, interest, and challenge. It's difficult and I'm not guaranteed the faculty committee will approve my proposal - a major like this has never been done before. The unprecedented nature of my idea adds pressure to be perfect, so the late night moon has caught me many times with steaming Turkish coffee (from last year's bedouins), tired eyes, pencil in hand, and pages upon pages of an evolving rough draft proposal.




Each morning I tell my tours to dream big. Wide-eyed highschoolers with astronomical GPAs and SAT scores stare at me when I tell them to look past the stats and percentages of a university...go somewhere you can thrive, I tell them. Go somewhere you can grow. Somewhere that allows you to dream big. Not just allows, but encourages....supports....partners with your dreams. I'm lucky to be in a place that lets me try new things, invent my own curriculum, propose my own education. We'll see if it gets accepted though...for now it's more coffee, polishing rhetoric, and daydreaming at the sky. 

If all goes well, I'll graduate with a:

B.A. in Global Development Studies: Public Health & Social Justice



Monday, July 15, 2013

Trayvon


This video is beautiful and incredibly important. At the end of the day, equal rights are being eroded and racism allowed to endure. And where are our political leaders? Where are the social, moral leaders demanding better of our systems? This shouldn't be allowed to remain another tragic incident in the annals of a tragic legacy.

"We must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers." -Martin Luther King Jr. (Eulogy for Martyred Children)

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

"Their own volition"

"Don't give chances. Or pose ultimatums. Or set rules.
Just let people go, and see what they do of their own volition...

If their free will doesn't lead to you,
why try to force it?
What good is a love
That you have to ask for?"


Tonight I ran across old messages from last summer sent from continents away. He was trekking through the Peruvian andes and I was working in Jordanian refugee camps. Sounds like a NatGeo couple doesn't it? Amidst faulty internet connections, exhaustion and sickness, and the expanse of half a globe, we detailed our experiences, our hopes, fears, frustrations, and stupid little nothingnesses that made us smile. And I rediscovered them tonight and all my victorious emotional courage and strength went swirling down the drain. The nostalgia is overwhelming, my face smiles at the memories, and my heart tears at the loss. Again. Damnit.


 Why did you let me go? Why didn't you fight for me? Why didn't you call me, text me, drive to me in the middle of the night when we were both a wreck? Why didn't you hunt me down and tell me you couldn't bear to lose me? My heart screamed as I put the ball in your court, left it up to you...and you...you never called.

Why can't I stop missing you?