There is purpose..

I have a few intentions in writing this blog.

The first, and most obvious, is to document my experiences of Latin America, where I have wanted to come for as long as I can recall. And to document the experience of travel, in and of itself. It seems like a nice, rather more efficient way of keeping my loved-ones up to date with my whereabouts and my movements, than tedious individual emails, which undoubtedly would peter out over time.. Although will try to keep up some of these as I want to honour the bonds I have with those at home, enduring though they are..

From my experience of travel, it can sometimes (but certainly not always) feel, at the time, to be unfulfilling, unromantic, or not what you expected (the last of which can be combated by shedding all expectations - something I haven't mastered yet). But with the benefit of hindsight, when we tell our tales weeks or years later, we realise what remarkable journeys we have been on. That what we thought to be mere meanderings were indeed grand odysseys.

The intention here is to bring the benefit of hindsight into the present. At the risk of sounding cliched, to bring myself into the present instead of indulging my terrible habit of looking constantly to the future. And to remind myself that it all has some purpose, or use, even the seemingly useless and banal. Even, to bring beauty and profundity to the banal. Not that I'm rejecting chaos by replacing it with order, just making sense of the chaos.

Also, simply, I love blogs. Have been, at times, a little addicted to the best of them. I see them as a kind of body-of-work where the creative process can be watched by those who keep track. I do worry though, that its a little self-indulgent (Really, many blogs are like personal diaries with spell-check). But I think this can be overcome with a bit of self-checking, remembering what's important, and making sure my ideas are firmly rooted in something real.

My hope is that if I stop for a short moment at the close of each day to write a word or two, everything will shift slightly into perspective. I don't know yet whether any of this will work, remains to be seen really..




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There are two poles of light in my chest, one flickers to the other continuously. Excitement and anxiety are interchangeable.
Home is the axis, the pivot point, and I am perched far out on the end of the minute hand.