First: Hello again to this small pocket of the ever-vasting Internet and you wonderful people who actually read these things – it’s good to be back (on campus, in classes, to not spending eight hours a day at a full-time job, etc.)! It’s been quite the summer, full of travels and eye-opening experiences that I just CAN’T WAIT to share with the World Wide Web, whether it likes them or not.
The most significant thing I did this summer was spend a month in Ireland with fourteen of my fellow art-schoolers on our questionably mandatory study abroad experience. There were many many laughs and smiles, there was much gasping at rocks (SO MANY ROCKS) and mountains and infinitely green fields, there was a whole lot of personal expression and learning and all that good stuff, some tears, new friendships, ALL THE FEELS, and most importantly (for me at least), a new way of perceiving my surroundings, a new kind of vision that has grabbed me by the eyeballs and refused to let go.
This is more pleasant than it sounds.
What I mean is that I’ve been possessed by the sense that everything I see and hear and do and feel is NEW and EXCITING, each time I see a tree or rock or a person’s face, it’s as if I’ve never seen it before. This is due to the fact that most things I saw in Ireland were actually completely foreign and unfamiliar to me – the rocks that literally explode from the ground, literally everywhere you look, were not just rocks (a cab driver once threw those words at me on the way back to Ballyvaughan from the city of Galway, and I nearly threw a punch, the only thing stopping me being that it would have been left-handed, him sitting on the right side of the car, of course) – but in my ecstasy of adventure and freedom, these rocks became a visible, physical connection to the Earth I come from, we all come from, the same Earth that we will return to in time (too morbid?). It was the most inspiring, comforting, eye-opening experience of my life, and this is one of the few things I now write that is not exaggerated. I spent a month waking up as if I’d just opened my eyes for the first time. Every solitary rock amidst miles and miles of drystone walls had been given meaning, had the traces of ancestors’ fingerprints written all over it; every leaf and twig and slug in the road became these glowing meaningful important things that I couldn’t bear to overlook, to ignore, to forget – in short, I heard the hallelujahs of Mother Nature, saw her hands working the land, in a constant state of creation and destruction, the whole process beautiful and amazing to me.
I think it’s easy to get stuck in our daily routines and comfortably familiar experiences – the faces of friends and family we know and love, the places we feel connected to, restaurants with “usuals”, streets with names we know, beds that smell like home – these are the things I definitely missed while abroad. But at the same time, if we mistake routine for knowledge and wisdom, and let comfort veil our eyes to the new and exciting things that happen to us every day, our surroundings and experiences lose the meaning that I now try to see in literally EVERY thing. This is not me saying I’ve achieved instant Buddhahood, or am now walking around more “enlightened” than you beautiful people who’ve happened to come upon this digital collection of words, hell, maybe checking this site is part of your own routine and you’re on here daily. MORE POWER TO YA! I’m not even saying that I feel the same excitement and wide-eyed amazement at everything, every moment of every day. I don’t. All I’m saying (bear with me for meta-cheesy feels here) is that if we stop every once in a while to pick up a leaf or rock off the ground and wonder how it got there, or think about how we would describe a sunset or trees waving in the wind or the infinite ripples of currents in some body of water (even the less-than-Mighty Huron River) to someone who has never seen them before, that maybe we could learn to appreciate it all a little more, and learn that our puny human problems are not so bad, that we will keep on living as we always have, us little piles of up-sitting mud who are lucky enough to get to sit up and look around for a while (thanks Vonnegut). All I’m saying is that it’s nice to get excited about things, about life, and to have that excitement come from inside; it’s nice to think of everything as new and fresh and meaningful because it IS, nothing is the same twice, I myself am now a different person than I was when I started writing this, metaphorically and physiologically, my atoms are new, they are excited to run my hand along the bark of that tree I’ve passed daily for a week and a half, knowing it too is not the same as it was the last time I saw and felt it.
This has been a rant. Long story short: I had fun in Ireland. I’ll probably be posting about it for a while. Hope you don’t mind.
🙂
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