"We're just two lost souls swimmin' in a fishbowl..."

It is impossible to write every detail, every step on any particular leg of this journey of ours.  This journey that we all share together.  Yet so much of me desires to do so.  To record every second, every beautiful face, every wonderful moment, so that I will never forget.  But it is impossible.  It is impossible to describe all the experiences one person can undergo in just a week and a half.  All I can say is, this adventure has only reinforced what I already knew, that I live for the people I meet - for those that I have met, for those I am currently getting to know, and for those who have yet to impact the very course of my world, my thinking.

When we travel, we already make ourselves vulnerable.  We put ourselves in a brand new context and we wait to see what happens.  We don't know the language, we don't know the culture, we don't know the geography... and so, in my opinion, all this "unknowning" somehow opens us up - makes us less nervous about what others think, because the fact is, you're fucking foreign.  Nobody is going to understand you anyway, you are automatically an outsider.  And when you are with a group who speaks your same language and can communicate with you, like the 29 other classmates I live with and travel with on a daily basis, that openness tends to expand and intensify, because they become the only people that you feel understand you.

You let your guard down, and they also lower theirs.  We are traveling, now is not the time to keep a closed heart or mind.  You accept what you find.  And I for one never stop being amazed at how quickly and how deeply people can come to know each other and fall in love.  For I am in love with this group of people - their various personalities, their individual senses of humor, their talents... It is difficult to process all of the information received about who they are, where they come from and why they think the things they do, or act the way they act.  It is simply impossible to record it all in my journal, to try to make sense of it all.  And there is something magical about that too.  It would have to take a most expansive imagination to put it all together in a meaningful way.  But I hope someday to have enough courage and imagination to do just that.

And it's not just those in my group either... I have met some wonderful Thais, Americans, Italians, Germans, etc., outside of this program that light up my life... make me smile.  No matter how much I try to record in my journal, I have so far never forgotten the spirit-enlarging connections I have made with other beautiful traveling bodies during my past adventures, and therefore there is no reason to think that I could forget the experiences of this last week and half.  It feels as though I have already met, known and loved each of these individuals, and every time, we're just two lost souls swimmin' in a fishbowl year after year...  I really do wish you were here.