1 post tagged “okinawa”
After almost two years of blurking on Okinawa blogs and making "friends" with other people through their blogs, I sit here composing my very first ever blog entry in an effort to chronicle the official beginning of my real, not just virtual anymore, journey back to Okinawa for my students, friends and friends to be! I'm suddenly feeling quite mute, but am hoping I'll warm up and words will flow. I have a good case of analysis paralysis and don't know where to start, but I know there is magic in beginning, so here I go...
It's hard to explain something you don't understand yourself, but for whatever reason Okinawa has drawn me back like a moth to a flame. Am I looking back to the magic of my adolescence in Okinawa where I was safe to explore in a subtropical fairy tale? Every single sense comes alive in a place that is so marvelously and exotically different than anywhere you've ever known.
Two years ago my daughter, was about the same age as I was when my father was stationed on Okinawa. I couldn't help but compare my life then to her life now. Because we spend so much time concerned for her safety, she is probably very sheltered. She would say to leave out the "probably" and that sentence would be accurate. Will she be missing something that only the freedom to explore brings? What about the exhilaration that really spreading your wings with parents who aren't fearful brings?
I assist in the computer lab of the lower school at a private Episcopal school in Atlanta, the same school my daughter has attended since she was four and the one she will graduate from in two short years. There, the Greenbaum family funds three faculty enrichment grants annually and this year I got off the fence. I didn't take the application information out of my box and put it in recycling. I took the application out and got busy pouring my heart into that application.
My husband and daughter were my biggest cheerleaders, encouraging me all along the way. "Go and do this" they said. They gave me everything I could possibly need to feel good about pursuing this opportunity and that just fills my heart to overflowing with a sense of love and gratitude and the knowledge that I am blessed by them every single day of my life. Every single one of my friends cheered for me every day, too, always supporting, never glazing over and backing away when I'd work Okinawa, somehow, into almost every conversation.
I'll say here that "The Secret" can work. It doesn't work when you are sitting in the stands at a track meet and trying to help your daughter take 30 seconds off her best 3200 time. No, it works when you aren't thinking about "The Secret" at all, but when you are so involved in a project, obsessed even, that you aren't thinking about anything but what it will feel like when you get off that plane and feel the hottest, most humid air imaginable and breathe deeply to smell the smells you haven't smelled in 33 years and you feel what being blessed to be back feels like. Thank you, Carol and Tom Greenbaum, for a dream come true.
I'll be blogging to share my journey with anyone who's interested. I'll pick up now, two years in, with the receipt of a Greenbaum grant that will allow me to get on a plane and fly and I'll be writing about what happens along the way. I'm planning on posting from Okinawa when I have internet access and I'll be posting about what happens here in Atlanta between now and July 2, when I get on the plane. I hope you'll check in.
