… a T. S. Eliot poem was always a great inspiration for me.
We must not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at the place where we began, and to know it for the first time.
It’s a time of revisiting old things like this. Returns, rekindlings, reconnections–but also a lot of edits, too. There are times that you run up against such realities. We aren’t the same people–you, me, the people we used to know. It’s different, here, where I am, having returned after quite a bit of time away. More than a decade, yeah–stuff’s not the same as it was.
The quote was something that I kept around for many years and still have in the stored stuff left behind and meant to return to, just not this much time later. I remember people telling me that happened to them. Go abroad and… just kinda like, stay there.
Cambodia wasn’t the place I ever imagined I’d be based the longest, outside the US, but there you go. And now it’s a home away from home. A kind of familiar turf, far from this one, very far. A hemisphere away. Gearing up to make the trip back and start new things with our zines and the clubs that are for writing, reading, and community-building, very soon. Looking to interlink them with the wider set of people I’ve met on other tours, not just this one, but this one, too.
Making things up as we go, that was the story of leaving in 2013. Making cool things with other people is so very fun, this is the one of arrival, this summer. Ready set, let’s converse? Let’s play.