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| Flying back to the US; feels so surreal |
As I watch the tiny icon of an
airplane inch its way west across the virtual Atlantic on the screen in front
of me, I can feel each inch as it tugs me farther away from the German borders
to which I have become so accustomed. Each time the friendly, multilingual
staff drops by my row, the words that slip off my tongue have defaulted to
Germanic tendencies despite the Anglican fluency of all those around me.
Preferential, you might say. Flight after flight, checkpoint by checkpoint, I
cross the point of no return, or do I? My heart is unable to adjust in such
tumultuous situations as it is beckoned in many tongues from many lands; how
can it find method of settling if I have no solid plan, no final destination as
of yet? Denver. That's where I'll start. Then what? I have two final semesters
of my double bachelor's degree at the University of Northern Colorado that will
be complemented by workshops, conferences, visits to my family, rebuilding my
harp callouses and desperately seeking both franco and germanophones to keep
the polyglot, that is multilingual, version of myself adrift.
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| Managing to take root on rock (Mallorca, July, 2013) |
A word of my own language struck me
today as I mindlessly glanced at the episode of the Big Bang Theory playing on
the airline's entertainment program: Roots. I picture a tree, a flower, a
tracing of origin to that which fed and built you. Trees grow, harbor life,
shelter life, give life, but they do not move except when adjusting to wind
patterns and changing climate. Flowers can be moved, picked, transplanted just
as a tree. Traditional doctrine teaches us that roots are the beginning, the foundation,
the lifeline, the nourishment. Can we ever change our roots? Can we take them
with us or will we always leave some piece of us, some straggler of a memory or
life behind in the ground from whence we came? Pardon the extended metaphor,
but I feel completely uprooted and am also contemplating the notion of
searching for a new garden.
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