All I want is to achieve some small measure of greatness.

echoes in the dark.

I'm not sure why, but this evening, I have a feeling of intense loneliness lying upon me like a thick, greasy fog.

It's not the sort of loneliness that you can dissipate by talking to a friend or a loved one; rather, it's a deeper, more....essential(?) type of loneliness. It's soul-deep, I suppose. It's not a feeling that makes you sad, nor is it the satisfying feeling of enjoying your own company. It's just kind of...uncomfortable.

You feel as though suddenly, you have slowed down and everything that reaches your ears or comes out of your mouth oozes in and out like molasses. Every movement you make is sluggish. The world moves about you at an impossibly fast rate and you are left behind, kind of slow and helpless. Lethargic despite your best attempts. You look around with slow, stupid eyes, barely comprehending the events that happen around you as the world rattles along like a rickety gypsy caravan barreling down a winding dirt road, the echoes of bells and laughter floating back to you as you are left standing barefoot in the middle of the dark road.

Unsure.

A part of you longs for someone, anyone who may have been left behind with you. You spin through the rolodex in your head, hoping for a lightbulb to go off when you see a name. A few names make you pause, but each time, the light wavers for one reason or another, and you spin on. On and on and on until you reach the final "z" and are left with what you had before: nothing.

I'm really never sure what to think when I'm in this kind of place. When I was younger, this sort of state frightened me, upset me and brought on tears. But as an adult, I have lost my fear and learned to simply look at it and examine it like a biologist studying a specimen. This has made the experience much less troubling, but it has brought me no closer to identifying or understanding it. It simply is. There, black and sharp, and shimmering sticky, IT IS. It offers no apologies or explanations. Rather, it seems to wordlessly demand, "What will you make of me?" I feel as though it is expecting me to eventually (one of these times) understand why it is there. But I always stare, uncomprehending, until it vanishes with a dismissive exclamation, off to hibernate until its next appearance.

Will I ever understand what it truly is?

I can't help but feel an overwhelming sense that there is great potential in this dank, bizarre, musty feeling. This experience is brimming with a meaning that is right in my face, showing me in the surface of its waters the reflection of myself and MY meaning.

Yet, as through a glass darkly, all I can see are shadows.

All I can hear are echoes.

"But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars."

I've been very ill for the past few days, so I guess that's what brought it on.

There's something about being ill that cuts you down to your most essential self. You don't have the strength or stamina to put on the normal airs and pretenses that you usually make use of. You have no choice but to be genuinely, completely, exhaustedly yourself. When you have to get up to move around, you do it with the open, helpless innocence of your inner self, of your deepest inner child. Your mind is too shot to focus on the trivial, so you wander into contemplation of the bigger, more profound, more all-encompassing. Small things simply don't have enough weight to hold your focus.

I can only guess that this was the trigger because it's the only thing I can find that can account for it.

I was traveling across the city today, trying to get home in order to do some work. It's a bit chilly these days; not cold yet, but the overpowering heat is definitely retreating. I had to hop on a couple of different busses to get home because I was feeling too weak to think of walking back to my flat from the metro (although only a paltry 10-15 minute walk, I was really feeling that ill). Suddenly, as I was sitting at the bus stop in Şişli waiting for my second bus, it washed over me with the rapidity of the incoming tide: a strong, odd, but very familiar feeling that I have not felt since before I settled down into a job here and stopped backpacking or living like a student.

I had trouble identifying it at first. It felt like an old friend, and I welcomed it even before knowing what it was that I was embracing. I let it settle over me until I recognized it. It was that feeling, that strange, wild feeling of loneliness and isolation that sets you free even as it terrifies you. It is like feeling a current pull you out into the vast ocean of human experience. You have a sudden sense of the massiveness of the world and its people, of your infinite minuteness. You are overwhelmed by the reality that you can never know all the world and everything in it, that it will always be, at the end of the day, a mystery. You cannot be the master of any part of it. No level of comfort or familiarity can ever defeat this truth. On some level, all will always be foreign to you, and you will always be a foreigner.

It is easy to lose this sense of lost identity when you have a nice job, a busy schedule, a nice place to live, and enough money to do more or less what you please. You settle into a sense of normalcy, and you lose sight of the deep-down wildness of the world. As a student or a backpacker, you cannot lose it so easily; you are always living on the edge. Not having enough money helps. You are never very separate from the realities of life. I guess this is one of the reasons I've never really liked living in very nice neighborhoods: these places create a distance between you and the wilder nature of reality.

Sitting at the bus stop, sick as a dog and thinking only of lying down in my bed and ordering take-out, I felt as if a veil was being lifted from my eyes, and for the first time in nearly two years, I saw again that reality and felt again the deep truth of my own separateness and isolation. And God, was it liberating.

I truly love my own solitude. It has become sacred to me. It is this golden sliver of time in which you are truly, honestly yourself. It gives you the time and energy to delve into the eternal mystery that is one's own mind and soul. It gives you the space to connect to yourself. Isolation is not a curse but a blessing. It is a gift. Without it, where is self-discovery? Without it, where is clarity of the self? Without it, how can we reach to others with real and true Love? Knowing yourself and loving yourself honestly and genuinely allows you to love others.

Isolation does not prevent relationships; it strengthens them. It gives more depth and meaning to every encounter. It gives you the insight, love, and compassion to engage fully with the people around you. Seeing yourself is seeing others, for who around you is not, like you, a person searching for joy and fulfillment?

We are alone. All of us together are alone. Why does that need to be a bad thing? Can it not be joyful? Can we not rejoice in our opportunity to know ourselves, to open our hearts wide enough to embrace all of this mysterious, unknowable world with unconditional fervor? Can we not glory in the wondrousness of a world that is too big for our minds and egos but big enough for our hearts? We can work a lifetime to know and understand the world and ourselves, but we never fully can. Is that not exciting? Is that not a thrilling idea, to know that you will never run out of people to meet or things to experience or wonders to witness?

Because you are always alone, you are always surrounded. You are always swept by the current of the vast ocean, alone and apart yet deeply within it. Is that not intoxicating? Is that not exhilarating?

Does that not set you free?

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!"