So I'm in this new city of ticky tacky houses that all look just the same and a highway renamed for Ronald Reagan and city blocks of Target, WalMart, and Chilis. I feel as flamboyant as a rainbow-spotted unicorn, just as fictional and irrelevant to daily living.
I am in the land of Republicans and Evangelicals.
This isn't to say I'm opposed to political difference. Not at all. As a teacher of rhetoric and composition, I strongly advocate for my students to think independently and critically about contemporary issues and to thoughtfully engage with the world and our experience and consumption of it. This means, naturally, that people come up with significantly different ideas of how things ought to be and how we achieve these utopian ideals. However, I believe that through educated discourse and respect, we grow as people and learn about the world in more complicated, interesting, and beautiful ways.
But, since I situate myself in the liberal-granola-eating-bike-riding-feminist camp, this new city has me cowed. I am tamed and hiding out.
Because of this, It feels particularly good to connect with another former Peace Corps person introduced by a mutual friend. My service itself irrevocably changed me, but my connections to other former volunteers continue to shape me profoundly. Through this network, I have met scores of brilliant and beautiful minds and I have built a family of incredible friends all over the globe.
Community is vastly important to me, and I have been blessed to have it in most phases of my life. For me, making a new friend is as exciting as seeing a new exotic location (pretty exciting!), and it's every bit as thrilling now as it was when I was five years old and anticipating the day when I would finally get to go to school and have more friends than just my brothers and sisters. I love the richness in people. I like hearing their stories and learning their idiosyncrasies. I am in love with the possibilities--the way our shared stories intersect and connect and broaden into an infinite web of relationship and experience. It is calming to me to get out of my own rattled and broken brain and realize that we are all both beautifully flawed and divine.
So while this new life step feels a little lonely and strange, I am happy today to hang out with a new friend and to look at the possibilities for expanding my little community and chosen family even here in the great Republic of Colorado Springs.
And I am continually grateful for the amazingly talented, supportive, encouraging, and thoughtful people who have come into my life thus far and are sticking around for the journey. (You know who you are, and I love you.)
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