Warming up

I've been pondering a blog name for months. For real, months. After knocking around a bunch of ideas with many of my brilliant friends, "Letters from a Sojournista" came together. I'm going to go all English teacher for a minute here as I say that the denotative definition of sojourn is a "short stay" (and I guess in the grand scheme of things two years is short), but connotatively speaking, a sojourner is someone seeking...something. I think I've always been a seeker. I seek knowledge, experiences, good friends...good food. For these reasons, I'm an avid reader, learning and living vicariously through the characters of historical fiction or the real life experiences of those writing memoirs from the Middle East. In the past couple of years, my craving for adventures abroad has increased. It's been a decade already since I was running around Barcelona. Really, all that reading now has just been a tease. So last summer my daydreaming started to become a reality when I learned about the University of Northern Iowa job fair. Months of preparing landed me in Waterloo with my mom, who is always a good sport, the first weekend of February. After interviews with schools in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Nepal, China (I was nearly sold on the fashionable, sexy Shanghai), and Ecuador, it is the Colegio Americano de Quito that will end up leading to many adventures, and I'm certain a fair amount of misadventures, on the border of the hemispheres. I'm already getting a taste of the way things work in South America as I have been to the Ecuadorian consulate twice and still my visa is not being processed. (Mr. Hill, if you are by chance reading this, I was not trying to play hookie those two days I had to take off. I was making an earnest effort to take care of business, it just didn't work.) So, the thing about being a seeker is that you most certainly find more than you bargained for. For better or worse. Or just for. I try to imagine the kinds of experiences I'll have and how those experiences will shape me, but any predictions I have, I believe, will be quite different than reality. Somewhere along the line here I've stopped trying to make so many plans or foresee my future--this has proved futile time and again. My evolving yogic self is doing her best to just be open. And here I go...