I’m an American living in Kobe, Japan, but I won’t be for long. After over four years of living away from home, this summer my husband and I will be returning to Michigan. It’s exciting and scary, all at the same time. In some ways I feel like a high school or college graduate all over again, with people asking the inevitable, “So now what are you going to do?” And, after all the time I’ve spent living abroad, I am certainly still unequipped with an answer (I can’t say I ever will have one definitive answer for what I’m going to do in my life).

 

No matter what comes my way I’m determined to stay positive and continue having adventures–even if my adventures might seem rather ordinary to most people. And so here I am with a new blog, one that is more personal than the one I’ve shared with my husband while living in Japan… One that is written by only me.

 

With this blog I am hoping to play around with the following ideas, though these could change along with everything else in my life:

We’ll see how it goes. Before I close I wanted to explain one last thing: the title of my blog. I don’t often read poetry, but when I do I especially enjoy poetry written by Gary Snyder. He has one poem in his collection Danger on Peaks in which he translates some Japanese:

While Snyder is talking about mountain climbing, I also see the little poem as a metaphor for life. I’m a tiny snail creeping along in the big, big universe, and–no matter how seemingly small I am–I keep hanging on and going up.