moondance

(picture at the right on my walk home)
i think maybe i should just skip sleep this evening. i am leaving at 5am to begin my long journey, and i haven't yet packed my backpack with its very important essentials. i just said goodbye to almost all of my friends from the flat building, some of whom are actually far from american and will be making a pretty much permanent departure from my life. strange, mostly. i finished my grad school application today verrry last minute, and i'm not sure if it's what they wanted, but i think it says the right things about me. guess it is out of my hands at this point. i also went immediately after printing it all out to see some world music - a group of african guys from guinea called ba cissoko. they were really excellent actually, and i kept thinking "i could fall so in love with africa." they came in with their visceral, thorough, natural sound and created their own realm for it in our space - we and not they at all were the ones who were made awkward. i thought that it could never be mine, this world of their music, but that it was a beautiful gift they were offering to me. it was like watching them make love to their instruments...and trying not to crack up at the wildly silly dancing efforts of the entirely white audience, or at least so it went for me.

i wish i was currently more excited about this trip, but mostly things are just rather weighty right now in various and diffuse ways, and i don't really know what i'm getting myself into (which for whatever reason seems more worrisome than adventurous, guess i am a wee bit anal). i spent all day thinking about meaning and how to make it (because it was what i was writing about for my application), which doesn't help to keep me feeling light and fancy-free. but i know that i am about to love the things i will be doing, that the amount of thoughts and perceptions i just experienced in paris will multiply tenfold in such great ways. i promise to keep a written log of my thoughts and experiences, and hopefully when i return i can post them by bits and pieces instead of one big lump, so you can pretend like you were following along. certainly though there will be pictures, and great unknowns. wish me luck! i need to go break in my new fancy north face walking shoes (a generous gift from my mountaineering companion) around my flat while i'm packing.
and who knows, maybe i will make a spiritual discovery. you can't force those things, but i'll let you know.
all my love, and think lucky thoughts that my legs and feet won't break.