and we'll all go together

After I had sufficiently shocked the entire apartment from showing up at UMD, I caught up with recent troop movements of the nation. My friend Ib is gonna change the world. He's from Sierra Leone and has gone through a hell of things already, but his non-profit he's starting up (which started as a campus initiative), is wild. Recently he went home to explain to his hometown in S.L. how to avoid contracting malaria; to deliver what might be, in sterilized terms, "tuition packages" to kids to go to school, but what really consisted of him walking the streets finding homeless kids, and coordinating schools, shelters, pen pals, and enough of a care package to keep them in that situation. Then he comes back here and drums up support. I was swelling with so much pride and hope, that I know him, that I was just his friend and we milled around campus and Boston, and he's gonna change things, and that in the next step of our lives, my networks need to come in handy. The most important thing he said, though, was that the most joy he saw was when those schoolkids got to talk to a penpal in the States, because "it means someone cares."

And he's just one of many people I've realized this about in the past few days. I wrote a song with one ever-epic friend, talked shop with others, wore wigs. Today I continued a recording session which had been set up as a connection that my voice mentor sent my way. This was held in the old South Dartmouth countryside I grew up going to. Nashville likes his stuff, and apparently likes me as well, which was a little surreal.

Later tonight I was walking onto my soggy alma mater, playing old CDs my sibling haven't thrown out yet in the mild mist, knowing all the turns and stop signs from driving it hundreds and hundreds of times, sneaking into my friend's dorm and avoiding RAs, remembering what this weather felt like last year, the year before, the year before, the people who've come and gone..about the people I know in New York.

In the end, all I can think of is a Rilke quote, about the "constellation of things" that draw us together, and feel a little like an astronomer. I think of a Dorothy Day quote, "“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community” and realize we all act so new to this, but it is so deep to our nature.