Home again

It has taken me a week to catch up with myself. I was jet-lagged, bedbug-bitten, sunburned, sick, sore, and emotionally scattered when I got home. I'm very glad I went. I'm glad to be home in Portland. I wept with gratitude for my sweet little apartment when I walked in the door and felt my incredible privilege: I am safe here, I can drink the tap water and shower regularly, bugs don't suck my blood while I sleep, and life is easy beyond anything I will ever deserve. After a month without wide-band, without any way to process or post pictures, and without even email or phone contact, I have had time to think deeply about the ways I spend my time when I have a computer available 24/7. Here's the bare truth: I feel good about myself when I'm reading or writing, and I feel lousy about myself when I'm diddling around, surfing aimlessly or commenting rather shallowly on other people's journals and pictures, watching hours and hours slip by without even knowing what I've been doing. I love the illusion of connection that I get from Blip, Flickr, and Facebook; I love the ease of communication, the sense of being plugged into the world; and yet...I want to be more intentional about how I spend my time.

So I'm going to focus on the blog, as a place for stories, thoughts, questions, pictures, and more. I don't see the point in back-blipping a whole month's photographs, and I was shooting a hundred or more pictures a day, many of them important to me because of my history with the place, so it's really not helpful to me to have to pick one a day to post. Some of you have generously and thoughtfully commented on the blog as I went along, and I am grateful for that. I want to catch up with all the pictures and thoughts you all had during the month while I was gone, but I feel I need to be doing my own writing and thinking first--before I forget, before the sensory impressions begin to slip away from me, before the conversations and stories I heard begin to get jumbled, before the intensity of the journey wears off. I will not be going back to Africa unless I win the lottery and drink from the fountain of youth...this trip taxed me to my physical and emotional limits and exhausted my savings...so I want to squeeze all I can out of it before it slips away. Therefore I'm not going to be on Blip much. I've been posting a lot of pictures on my Flickr site, but I'm going to pull back from that for a while too, and just work on the blog.

Years ago, when I helped M'e Mpho record the stories of her life, she had doubts whether anybody other than the two of us would ever want to read it, but she enjoyed the process of examining her life. Telling me her story had been intense, exhausting, and pleasurable by turns, and in the end, it was her story, and she loved being able, as she said, "to hold it in my hands." Considering publication, she said doubtfully, "Others can read it if they like." I feel that same way about the blog. I need to do the best I can to polish it up and fill it out, just because I like to do things thoroughly and well, and the blog is going to be a resource for me for the rest of my days. Others can read it if they like, and not only that, they can ask questions if they want, or they can argue or fuss if they feel like doing that. I'm just going to do this. So I don't plan to be on Blip, Flickr, or Facebook much for the next few months.