What have I done?

Auckland, New Zealand

This is a story about embracing the real me.

As I take the first substantive leap, it is a story about saying goodbye to an extraordinary group of friends that seem to know me and love me for who I am, putting a perfectly reasonable career indefinitely on hold, and leaving the city that has become my home. It is a story about traveling around the world, on my way to an unknown future that has probably been patiently waiting for me since the beginning.

In the medium backward timeline, this is a story of self-interrupted ambition.

It is a story of newborn promise, then falling in love, following impulse halfway around the world, and starting over with nothing to call my own. It is a story of getting married and taking on a sublime in its innocent magnitude new ambition. It is a story of slipping to an inner bottom without knowing it, busy with what I thought I had to do to make the world turn, and losing sight of the point. It is a story of separation and divorce and a heart still broken. It is a story of taking the first good hard look in years.

In the longer backward timeline, this is a story of longing to be seen at last.

It is a story that recalls a sensitive and awkward childhood and adolescence; insecurity and longing to be understood. It is a story of an intellect in search of a dance partner, a storyteller in search of an art, a man desperate for a much more emotional, intuitive, spiritual, magical identity for masculinity. It is a story of new ideas applied to a remembered purpose. The nature of good and bad, the nature of love and pain, the nature of time. Quantum physics, synchronicity, the Mayan apocalypse. Finally and with surprising relief awakening to the knowledge that all my ponderings have been pondered before.

I haven't really succeeded in avoiding making my first blog entry about making my first blog entry. Or avoiding that somewhat unavoidable self-important blog-tone. But this in itself is on-topic; I respond to myself with, 'And why do I imagine I should I have to?' I expect to chronicle the narrative details of my travels, along with the ideas I have been exploring of late, and trace the threads wherever they seem to go back through my personal history.

Enough prologue, I begin.