Starting Out, Sallying Forth

I've been thinking about migration today.

I got online earlier to create this blog - this very public thing - with a sense of determination. It was something like how I felt when I bought my plane ticket to Buenos Aires a month ago; I sensed it could either be a terrible decision or a brilliant one. And, as when I bought the plane ticket, I clenched my jaw, shreiked loudly, inhaled sharply, and click! Blog created. Plane ticket to Buenos Aires purchased.

The blog stumped me early on, though, when it asked me for a "title". The airlines didn't try to question what I was doing - didn't ask me to qualify, up front, why I was traveling. They just wanted my credit card number. The blog, however, asked me to explain, to clarify. I think this is good, and I think this is the very reason I am forcing myself to start this blog. To explain myself to myself (as well as to anyone interested), to think through the whys of what I am doing. Of course I have thought about it. I didn't buy the plane ticket without months, years even, of thought behind it. But writing - and writing publicly - is a different way of processing, and I think it's especially good for me because I rarely do it (publicly, that is).

And so, in the spirit of challenging myself, I start this blog. Compared to heading to Buenos Aires alone, this ought to be a cinch, right?

Anyway, the blog asked me for my title, and migration is what initially popped into my head. I've told several people recently, when asked what I am going to do when I quit my job, that I am flying south for the winter. (I literally am!) It's a true migration.

I went through a few miserable (but very punny!) puns for titles, like Mygration, but that sounded a bit too much like something my mother would suggest for the title of my 4th grade History project. Deciding that wasn't quite my style, I visited one of my favorite websites, dictionary.com, for some inspiration.

Dictionary.com basically told me what I knew, that migration is "the movement of persons from one country or locality to another," and it is "usually a response to changes in temperature, food supply, or the amount of daylight, and is often undertaken for the purpose of breeding. " (That last part makes me giggle.)

So then it was onto Thesaurus.com, an even better website. There were a ton of synonyms for migration, but the ones that I found most applicable to my current situation are:

clearing, abandonment, departure, escape, evacuation, passage, retreat, vanishing act, withdrawal, adventure, exploration, pilgrimage, roaming, sally (this is apparently a verb meaning to go forth - look it up!), travel, wandering, action, change, development, evolution, exercise, flux, progress, stirring, translating, undertaking

Isn't that great? I knew I was migrating in the broadest definition of the word, but these words really encompass all aspects of what is happening and what is about to happen to me. This! is why I majored in English. I love this stuff.

But what do these words mean to me?

I started thinking about this movie I saw a few years back at the Belcourt in Nashville. "Winged Migration" is an amazing documentary about the migration of birds - if you've not seen it, rent it (though I think the effects are probably best felt on the big screen). My migration isn't really like the birds, of course. Birds undergo natural physical changes in preparation for migration, and they do it for survival - because they actually can't make it through the cold, short days!

Now, I could argue that if I were forced to stay here through this winter, I might not survive, but I would be exaggerating and being my usual dramatic self. I would survive. I would go to the grocery store, collect my food, take it home and cook it, turn up the heat, and get under my electric blanket. I would physically make it.

So my migration isn't necessary in the sense that it is for the birds, but it is necessary in the sense that it is for me. I don't know if that makes any sense, but this trip, this migration, is something I have very strongly felt coming on for about a year now, and it's something I am not doing lightly or spontaneously, as I am afraid my parents believe. It's something that I need so badly right now, and, as I told someone recently, I think we truly know ourselves when we can successfully identify our needs and realize them, no matter how pleasurable or painful that may be.

As thoroughly as I have thought through the actual migration part of all of this, though, and as certain as I am that this is something I need to do, I also realize that I have not gotten much past the leaving - the departure from New York, from Tennessee, from the US!

And so it is also very much an improvisation, something that will largely work itself out, without planning.

It's a departure, it's an undertaking, it's an adventure, it's an exercise in change.

I hope this blog will be fun and interesting for those who choose to read it, but I am mostly doing it for me - to document this migration, this improvisation, one day at a time.

29 days til take-off...