You're everywhere to me.

I live in the most glorious city in the world.

I love walking through its streets. Out and about running errands today, I felt the overwhelming is-ness of the people around me. A multitude of vibrant life. Every person I pass has something in their face that makes me ask myself questions: Who are they? Where are they coming from? Where are they going? Why? What to they do every day? Are they happy? Are they in love? Are they despairingly lonely? Are they excited by their daily life? Bored by it? Do they dream the same dreams that I do?

Lately, I have been deeply considering the relationships that I have with the people in my life. I have felt this sense of being adrift, unsure and without an anchor. I have never found it difficult to build relationships in general, but I feel that my entire life is being redefined, and with it comes a redefining of the way in which I relate to people.

What on earth does it mean to love the people around me? What does it mean to be free? To be passionate? To live my life in each moment with a great, resounding "YES!" ?

Is it possible to live a life that is truly fulfilling or will we always have to compromise a little bit? I feel as if I simply cannot place my finger on that vocation that makes me answer with complete acceptance from the very bottom of my soul. It makes me wonder if such a life of total alignment between our day-to-day occupations and our loves and passions is possible. Is there something out there in this wide world that I will awake excited to do every single day? Teaching is marvelous, it really is. It's completely rewarding. I love it. But does it strike me to my core and awaken my spirit with confidence and excitement? Some days, I really think that it is. Other days, I wake up with less certainty.

I ask myself these things each and every day.

Those people walking past me on the sidewalk here in Istanbul: do they ask themselves the same questions?

Sometimes in life--or in death, I guess--you just never know...

Do you feel emboldened or decimated at the realization of the temporality of life?

I find that I bounce between the two. I have never been one for in-betweens; I am an extremist. Some mornings, I wake up and feel thrilled and enlivened by the consciousness of the brevity of my life. I feel energized by the preciousness of the moment and excited by the realization that this one, brief flash, this ecstatic burst in the universe that is the timeline of humanity, will end. The shortness and delicacy of life makes it all the more precious. One wild and precious life.

Other times, I am so completely and utterly cast down by it. I feel the heavy clock of time weighing on me, its ominous tick-tock-tick-tock shaking my every fiber. I feel a panic, the threat of Poe-like madness. Breath shortens, enhancing the shortness of my time. The brevity. Oh, so brief...a murmur, whisper, undertone of something that prances around with self-assigned significance. This slight exhalation of some colossal Bahamut, real or imagined.

What are we?

How is it possible to feel simultaneously so mighty and so miniscule?

Every tear is a waterfall...

I have wondered a great deal lately if my lifelong search for a point and a purpose is really the great quest that every noble member of mankind must undertake.

So far in my life, it has been critical. Indeed, it has been the one thing that mattered. However many disasters occurred or uncertainties were felt, the faith in a grand Purpose made it all kind of make sense. It all connected in this one constant: that the world has a purpose. Fate has a purpose. Life has a purpose. I have a purpose.

Yet the older I grow, the more certain I am becoming that it just isn't that simple. Assuring myself that I simply cannot see the whole picture no longer does the trick. There are pieces missing that I cannot deny, and the effort that I make to force them to create a complete picture seems more and more hollow. I feel that my life and efforts are blown further and further out of control, and my neurotically obsessive need to maintain this control is being deeply and profoundly challenged.

I am slowly realizing that I am truly alone in the world. We all are. Not even those who love us the most and never want to leave our side will be there forever. Their loyalty may never fade, but a day may come when they can no longer be by your side through no fault of their own. This realization brings up mixed feelings. Some very natural depression follows from it, of course, but also a certain quietness of spirit. A neutral place that has no sorrow or joy but only contemplation. Because this revelation is a rather sacred and profound one; it changes how one lives life.

What if there is not a clear, clean-cut, easy-to-identify-and-label purpose to my life? What if the simple living of it as fully and completely as possible is all that there is? And what does this mean anyway? What if the fullest and most complete version of my life has nothing to do with the rosy images that we are taught from childhood to seek: marriage, family, children, a house in the suburbs complete with a white picket fence and a soccer mom van around the back? Am I allowed to be a wandering hippie for the rest of my life? Will doing none of the things I was taught by my society to want make me at all happy?

These answers all seem to be remarkably simple: yes, of course, do what you want! (Naturally, you'll change your mind about marriage and kids in just a few years when your bio clock kicks in and you meet the right man, but we'll pretend we don't think that until you outgrow this phase.) Be happy!

Mercy me...we all have opinions in the end, don't we?

I don't understand why answers have to be so very complicated. I'd give an awful lot for a solid "YES" "NO" or "IF YOU'RE VERY WELL-BEHAVED" to come thundering down from the Heavens. Something even I couldn't miss, ya know?

Well, wouldn't we all...

I wanna have the same last dream again / The one where I wake up and I'm alive...

The Adventure begins.

Perhaps it has already begun; perhaps it began a long time ago. Perhaps I'm only just realizing it. Perhaps I have always been "in the flow of it." But I feel the page turning now.

As many of you know, I have returned to Istanbul to live and to work. I have been back here a little over a month, and it's truly magical to be back. I love this place, this energy, this feeling. I feel better connected to myself here, and the importance of that cannot be overemphasized for anyone.

Work is good so far; we work extremely hard and quite a lot, but the compensation is well worth it. We are paid well and are expected to produce work proportionately. Fair enough for me! I like to be busy. So far, though, we've just been doing prep time. Classes begin tomorrow (yikes!), and I'm both excited and nervous. I'm teaching 4th and 5th grade at a very nice private school, so these children are very privileged and, in most cases, very intelligent. But kids are kids: they can be sweet or sour as they choose and as we as teachers connect to them. I hope that I have some sweet ones who love me and with whom I can connect well. :)

Things are progressing, moving, proceeding. Yet I still feel a lack of stability: ungrounded. The past couple of weeks have been very challenging on a personal level. Relationships with family and friends have been colored by sorrow. I don't understand why it has to be this way, and although I understand that it shall pass, it really sucks to wade through it. I feel so confused about who I am or want to be and where I want to take it all. I'm tired of people telling me that I don't have to know who I am at my age because I'm only 23. I don't care! I WANT TO KNOW!! I want that stability and security. I'm not interested in "feel-good" motivational phrases about it "getting better" or "working itself out" or anything like that. I feel frustrated, and think that that's valid.

Why am I not permitted to just feel frustrated?

I felt the same way when Dad died: Why can't someone for once just say "That sucks!" instead of trying to label it or rationalize it or fix it as they see fit? I don't want a solution to the unsolvable! I only want the freedom to express what I feel...we all do.

I WISH TO BE FREE TO EXPRESS MYSELF WITHOUT OPINION!!

Is that too much to ask?
I don't think so...

I think we all need this. How else will we wake up to being alive? How else will we dream up the adventure of our fulfilled lives instead of dozing through images of the hum-drum and the mediocre?

"Brutus, thou sleep'st.
Awake, and see thyself!"

Build me a dream that I can realize.

Cicada season is upon us in the Southeast. God's Creepiest Creation has taken over Nashville just in time for the summer, and it really couldn't be more disgusting.

For those of you blessed enough to not know what cicada season means, there is this very large and disgusting type of black, red-eyed locust that (in certain parts of America) crawls out of the ground by the millions for about six weeks every 13 or 17 years in order to mate, lay eggs, and then promptly die. They make a deafening noise throughout the region, perching in trees, flying around drunkenly, and falling to the earth in exhaustion. People's reactions range from mild amusement or annoyance to paranoid shrieking or hand-flapping at the suspected sound or sight of one of these little monsters.

It's a popular thing to complain about them or make fun of them. Whether you have a deep-seated fear of cicadas or find the terror of others to be a constant source of entertainment, you always enjoy laughing at them. Crazy-looking, obnoxious bugs whose life exists only for the purpose of reproduction? What's not to laugh at?

At the same time, although I find cicadas incredibly revolting, I've realized that, ironically, the simplicity of the life of the cicada is actually the ideal for which every human seeks. What is the meaning of life? What is my purpose? What am I supposed to do with my one short life? How can I find a purpose without compromising my own happiness?

These questions are perhaps strongest when one graduates from school, and the terror is overwhelming. The pressure of family, friends, and bills weigh upon the mind even as the constant rejection from one job or another saps one's enthusiasm and confidence. They are strong, too, when you find yourself in the middle of the American economic recession in your 40's, your job pulled out from under you and the prospect of starting a new career more daunting than ever.

In school, when they teach you about bullying, they explain to you that the bully often feels insecure and sometimes jealous and that these feelings motivate him to pick on the kids weaker (and often smarter) than he. Perhaps we as a society mock the cicadas not out of a sense of dismissal but rather out of a latent jealousy. What would we not give to have the meaning or purpose of our lives to be built into our DNA? Our instincts?

What wouldn't we give to be as fulfilled as the simplest of creatures?

This house is fallin' apart

There is something about traveling that shifts you.

It's almost unidentifiable. You think at first that it is; when you return home, people ask you "So how was it?" and you give them a million different answers. You describe people, places, buildings, moments, food, everything you can think of. You feel something different within you, and you try to voice it by describing the cultural differences you encountered and how they changed you or inspired you. You talk people's ears off with chatter about far-off countries that they're tired of hearing about, but even though you know they're sick to death of you, you feel like you've only scratched the surface. You want to say so much more.

How can you ever encompass the profundity of another life or world or culture within those meager words, the confines that make up conversation?

Everything is different. Your entire universe is rocked by prolonged exposure to a way of living that is completely different from the one you know. It's a whole new perspective, and it challenges every definition of anything you've ever had. It's as if you've spent your life looking at a table as just a table and you suddenly encounter a people who use it as a mode of transportation. It's so different; the idea never occurred to you. Your mind and your definitions are stretched. You start to wonder what else a table could be used for. A chair? A display pedestal for toddlers? A companion? And you are filled with the wonder of this expansion of your accepted ideas and perspectives. You want to share it every moment of every day because it was so importantly profound and moving, and you desperately want everyone back at home to get a taste.

But describing a different life perspective is so much more complicated than describing the functions of a conversation. A thousand conversations couldn't accomplish that.

What do you read, my lord? Words, words, words.

This is a short story I did for a travel writing scholarship application that I find out about next month. It's not as detailed as I'd like it to be one day since there was a word limit, but I think it turned out okay. :)

The Hammam

Echoes. Wet echoes. That’s all that can be heard. The original sound is lost in the dome above you, escaping out of the carved holes in the ceiling and into the faint sunlight that peeks in and reflects off the slick, warm stone of the floor.

I sit naked, waiting, sucking in the steamy air slowly so that it doesn’t burn my nose. I have come on a weekday, late, so there are only five other women in the great bathing room. I can tell that two of them are new travelers who know little of the conventions of the hammam by the way they are shyly wearing striped and polka-dotted bikinis. I look across the room and see an older woman, an employee of the hammam. She is completely nude and wet from the bath. She strides across the room confidently, her broad thighs shivering and her sizable belly hanging. I see in her a pride that seems to be an essential part of Turkish women. The bikinis of the girls seem so silly and insecure when compared with this dignified display.

My eyes wander around the stone walls of the hammam. They are white marble with cream colors in their depths. All of the stones are warm, heated so that they are comfortable to sit upon. Along the walls are metal faucets that pour water from open mouths into marble sinks when the handle is turned. I see two other girls, both slender Asians, washing themselves with water from one of these sinks.

Its name is Cağaloğlu Hamamı. I love this name, so full of the silent Turkish g’s that I cannot pronounce. Its age can be felt in the energy of the place, and I am not surprised that this is the oldest of all the Turkish baths in Istanbul. It seems as if time has paused here. Without clothes, the modernity of a person is lost. I could be sitting in an ancient hammam from the time of the sultans. Indeed, it seems as if these women washing us have been living in the bathhouse for centuries, quietly washing and scrubbing the beautiful, quiet women who come to be cleansed.

When my bather comes, I lie in the middle of the room and am washed like a baby. I relax, allowing the rough textures of the scrubbing cloth to exfoliate me. The sharp, lemony scent of the soap stings my nostrils slightly. Afterwards, the woman smiles and takes my hand as she leads me to a sink and rinses me off. My whole body is pulsing with lively circulation. I feel as if I have a new skin.

After I leave, the cold January wind strikes my warm cheeks, but I take no notice. I am filled with the peace of those wet echoes that, in my mind, will never cease in the ancient Turkish hammam. My body has been cleaned, my spirit soothed.

How's the Vienna-congress going on? It doesn't go, it dances!

Vienna is refined.

Although I know that the tulip is of Turkish origin, I feel that it is an excellent flower to embody the nature of Vienna. It is a flower first and foremost of a careful, sturdy structure. It has a long, thick stem and a large leaf that wraps around it for sensible protection. The petals of the tulip primly cover the flower's center as if aware of the human decorum in covering all things related to reproduction. These petals only fall off when the flower is ready for this process and not before; one must peer closely into it in order to see further. Yet what can be seen from the outside is a perfection of nature. The petals blush yellow, pink, red, white, or whichever tone strikes the tulip's fancy. The blush is a deep, glorious blaze as beautiful as the fiercely commanding monarchs who once ruled from the palaces to which such tulips have long belonged. Each petal, each leaf, each stem is smooth. Bewitching. Elegant. Imperious.

The Viennese speak Austrian German with a graceful acknowledgment of it as a superior language. After all, is their city not the historic seat of one of the greatest Empires of all time? The clear, strong syllables that can be heard over the intercom throughout the meticulously organized system of metros and trams convey a confidence and a clarity of structure that is remarkable to experience. It takes a matter of minutes to get from one side of Vienna to the next. It has neither the vastness nor the population of Istanbul, but I think that even if it did, it would take far less time to navigate. Never before have I seen so efficient an organization.

I actually find myself experience more culture shock coming to Vienna from Istanbul than I felt coming from America to Turkey. I suppose that coming from America, I expected nothing to be as I had known it. I embraced the difference. Yet Vienna caught me completely off guard. The shock of people following traffic rules, not speaking Turkish, and stopping their vehicles in order to let me cross the street has been a little unnerving. The occasional snatches of Turkish that I hear from passing immigrants warms my heart and fills me with longing for the familiar. I wonder what it will be like to return to Tennessee...

Yet for all of that, Vienna is a remarkably romantic city. Its efficiency detracts not at all from its emotions. The elegance of the buildings around me displays a spirit of creativity inherent Vienna. Creativity of philosophy, mathematics, the sciences, the arts...all are there. Yet the most powerful spirit that I feel as I suck in the frozen January air of the city by the Danube is the spirit of MUSIC. It is played, it is written, it is felt. The Viennese hold balls throughout the year for its finest to attend in their most elegant and dance the night away to MUSIC. MUSIC is played in the massive Opera. In the midst of the city it is, I feel, by far the most dominating of all of Vienna's structures. Hours could be spent in admiring its outer structure alone. As I walk around it, gazing in awe, I feel the potential for romance...the tickle down my spine at the thought of another hand in mine, the prickling of my skin at the idea of another person's arm about my waist as we look in mutual wonder at this monument to the Muses. The music of love sings and waltzes through our veins.

I am sure that Vienna was made for lovers. Its very refinement demands the most refined of feelings. And what could be more refined than love?

Perhaps Vienna is not a tulip after all...perhaps it is a Viennese waltz between sweethearts...

I want to love you madly.

Istanbul breathes.

Every city has a different energy, a different personality. Whenever people visit a new place, they tend to try to dive headfirst into that energy. The try to bathe themselves in it, soak it up, let it fill their nostrils and eyes and ears and even slip under their fingernails. Then when they leave after a week or two, they leave confident that they have fully experienced that place in all its glory.

But the truth is that you can't learn a city in so short a time. It's only after the novelty has worn off that you begin to see the real parts of it, the rough edges and half-finished corners that all of the glamor covers up for the first several weeks or months. You stop looking eagerly into the shops and start looking up at the old, dilapidated buildings that regard you like old men reading a book that is constantly being written and re-written before their eyes. You slowly sense the billions of people who have been there before you. And your relationship with your surroundings shifts. You notice subtle changes in your behavior and clothing. People stop recognizing you as a tourist. The city permeates your very pores. It worms its way into your mind and heart and soul. The city is no longer yours; you are the city's.

Sometimes at the bus stop near school, when I'm tired of waiting for the bus that takes me straight home, I take one of the buses that will take me to the Levent metro so that I can take that the rest of the way back. When it isn't too cold or rainy, I prefer this way because I have to walk down the street and through the metro, and I see more people just living life. Almost every day, just inside the Levent metro entrance (after you've gone down the escalator), there is a blind man selling newspapers. He has a badge around his neck that proves his right to sell his papers, and he stands there holding his cane and a bundle of his wares. He is always speaking softly in Turkish, encouraging passersby to take pity on his plight and reward his efforts. I can't help but admire his dedication; I wish I could give him money every day.

Sometimes, few feet from him, there is a little girl sitting on the ground playing a recorder for money. She always has some kind of case in front of her, wordlessly begging for the spare change of strangers. I feel a surge of pity for her every time I see her. She is so young...perhaps 12 years old at the very oldest. Why is she playing a recorder in the metro for money? She should be at school learning about literature or math or playing at recess. I never give her money. I want to, but I can't bring myself to; I know her parents are pimping out her pitiable sweetness, and I can't contribute to their abuse.

Istanbul breathes in a way so very different from any city in America. It breathes like a sage, a wise being who has seen too much, who has been torn and ripped and loved and hated and destroyed and recreated. Yet it breathes steadily. Istanbul is very much alive. Nashville dozes and smiles like a contented hippie. Indianapolis gazes like a slightly aloof parent. The entire state of California can't sit still. They all breathe, but Istanbul breathes consciously. It has seen so much more. Every breath that it takes is full of the understanding of the gift of life and the temporal nature of every passion, every effort. Istanbul sees sorrow and joy seated alongside each other and only watches. It has seen every terror and every ecstasy, and though it still feels the awe of each, it is no longer a child. A scratched knee is no longer enough to make it weep.

I feel Istanbul pulling me into it, absorbing me. The longer I am here, the more I fall into its arms. It has all of the charms of a lover, and the warmth of its embrace is intoxicating. I feel myself falling in Love. The infatuation has come and gone, and the fervency of a real Love is blossoming. I find myself desiring never to leave it. Yet I feel the pressure of time.

My friend left for home yesterday. The first to depart. Another American, he was crushed. I could see the pain in him as he felt himself being torn away from his new love, his new city. His regret was palpable; he pondered the friends and places and people he was leaving, and I could feel a little part of his heart breaking. I remained cheery in our goodbyes, but inside, my heart thunked against my ribcage, and I felt a chill as I realized that my goodbye is coming soon. The thought fills me with sorrow, yet it also fills me with the determination to return. When in love, I am loyal. I am in love with Istanbul. And it is in love with me, I think...

Istanbul, seni seviyorum!

I will explore other cities, enjoy other places in the next couple of months before returning to Nashville. But I have a feeling that my heart will drag me right back here. I think this is where I belong. :)