Who I am

I perch over my keyboard from my makeshift desk (bed) in Edwards, Colorado, which I have made my home over the past six weeks, and will continue to do so through the coming six. The coming six weeks will be the final set before I leave this place.

I’m learning that each word counts. And that all writing is is placing each word on the scale and weighing it, comparing its weight against the weight of the sentence, and adjusting accordingly. Maybe I swap out “pursue” for “chase”. Maybe I chop the end of the paragraph because the weight is less of a channel and more of a vestigial limb of a sentence passed.

The me in this time of July 2019 is a post-graduate from Virginia Tech, having ostensibly studied applied management in Wildlife Conservation with numerous side and all-claiming research projects into nuances of ecology and human dimensions. Behind the science veneer, I also studied humanities, literature, culture, and social justice. All four braided into one, the name for which is elusive and perhaps yet unknown to me. Still, I look for it.

I treasure the memories of golden hours spent at the home of my literary and spiritual mentor, evenings curled around ceramic mugs of tea, spent abandoning the traditional beliefs about life for something more, something intuitive, something in the beyond. Equally treasured are the mornings spent birding in pursuit of a research answer, watching the flaxen light of late Appalachian summer sift through the tulip-poplar and white oak and sourwood and hickory and birdsong as I recorded the trills and bleats and chirps of summering breeding birds.

Equally compelling is the promise of lessons yet to be held and absorbed. For a worldview shed upon arrival in a land new to my physical perception though I’ve read and studied them from afar. For the momentary, consuming difficulty of growth in the instant that it strikes at the hot core of being. For the breathy, expansive relief after realizing that the difficulty was a spiritual growth spurt, not a bode for the rest of life.

I’ve come, I’m going.

But why am I here, now, being who I am?

I will be using public venues as my expression and professional persona in the coming years, and I have stories worth sharing.

I will be writing reports from my travels, reports on the world I observe, reflections on moments of growth and focal experiences, and the sharing and grappling with ideas.

I want to find other storytellers, other journalists, other travelers that write on the move.