Always We Begin Again

It seems odd or at least unexpected to restart this blog after such a long break. It was designed to be a travel blog, a record of my thoughts and experiences while on the road in Guatemala and Mexico. And I guess I liked the idea of it and the name of it, the sense of it, enough to decide to write on it again.

I wonder why now. Today seems like such a significant date. But it's really the physical new start to an idea I've been toying around with for some months now.

Why blog? Why write? Why say anything? Aren't there already too many people saying things? Aren't we already drowning in the shouting idiocy of our political class, the media and the writhing mass of the Internet, with its accusations, recriminations and outbursts? Why add another voice? Wouldn't a voice of silence, in some sense, be appreciated? One not talking, the silent one amid the chanting crowd? There is also a sense of "look at me" millenial type navel-gazing involved with writing about yourself.

I've thought seriously about these questions. And yet I've decided to come back to it. I guess I just like writing and I have been told by some they enjoy reading my writing. So why not keep writing? And maybe someone will read it. Maybe someone will respond to it. Maybe it will resonate with someone. Maybe a conversation could get started.

I don't know what will happen here or what I'll write about. Probably about the things that interest me. Politics. The environment. Religion and spirituality. History. Economics. Society. Art, theater or film. Maybe some of all of that.

The last post was from November of 2007. This blog is four years old?

There is a sense of risk here, too. Writing. Putting out on the Internet the wandering, rambling thinkings of this 28 year old version of myself. I'll probably look back on much of this with the awkwardness and slight embarrassment I get from reading things from my past that I once thought were so great, so well written. My senior thesis. That essay I wrote in high school AP English. Really? This? But hopefully I can keep a bemused sense of detachment from it. To think, Ahh, yes, this - I remember this.

This was meant to be a travel blog. I was on an interesting and different road. Central America! Spanish! Bringing your own roll of toilet paper with you! The stream of interesting and engaging things was seemingly without limit. Now it's "Just here." I'm "just here" in DC. And yet, I'm only here for a while. Unless I die here. I'm really just passing through. Oh, those were my eleven years, my three years, my forty one years in DC. Now this is the new period of my life, in London, in Mobile, in New York, in Arrequipa. How funny. The illusion of permanence. I'm here forever! Simply because I'm here now. There is no sense of end or terminus because this is "home." But in the long term, who knows how long this home will be my home. Until I have to pull up the stakes, pack up the tent and move on.

So a renewed sense of wonder. Of engagement. My life as a 28 year old unmarried man in Washington DC, the nation's capital, in these the years just after the end of the twenty first century's first decade. A brief moment. A window in time. A statically irrelevant blip on a geological timeline the expansiveness of which is beyond my comprehension...

And yet. (Always, "and yet") Here I am, writing in a park on a brand new and very tiny Toshiba laptop computer, seated on a bench in Kalorama Park in DC, wearing shorts, flip flops and a T-shirt, with my legs crossed, on this warm and humid September day that really is just the final waning (one expects? hopes?) experience of summer. Before the chill, the leaves, the darkness of fall...


(The post title comes from the Rule of Benedict; it's a phrase I find particularly lovely, a way of forgiving yourself and beginning anew.)