It’s amazing how easily and completely one event can envelop your world. Things that have not yet occurred tend to preoccupy me, rather than things that have already happened. I vacillate between acceptance (“This is how I am!”) and frustration (“Why am I like this?”) when faced with this fact. Despite the cliché of “the moment”, something important and valuable is contained therein. Those who have access to it avoid (or seem to do so at least) the dangerous narrowing of focus that plagues people who cannot divorce themselves from either the future or the past. Thinking about the future or the past is not a necessarily negative activity, but viewing them to the exclusion of the rest of reality is. At the moment I’m swinging frustration at the future like a bat.

I had hoped to set things in motion prior to July so that upon returning, we’d be ready to rock and roll. In doing this I neglected to account for many factors which has resulted in rescheduling, surprise attacks by the accounting fairy (who says, “Oh! That grant is no longer available. I guess you’re SOL!”), and a general shrugging of the shoulders. What a lesson: no amount of desire or planning can push, pull, or confuse people into going where they don’t want to go. The time has to be right, and if the time isn’t right, you wait until it is.

Watching the days slip by last March was a bit like lazing in a canoe on a reservoir – no particular hurry; might as well relax and read a book. Apparently, the canoe has now sprung a leak and is racing towards a cataract below the dam’s burst wall – at least it’s a little more exciting! Of the several things on the to do list (project proposal, world map, mud oven, chicken coop, watershed management workshop, so on and so forth) perhaps one will run the gamut and survive. Melodrama. I keep hoping that a deus ex machina waits to rescue me still - I will ride an airplane soon enough…

In less dramatic news: I’ve been practicing the songs that Mike and Leah would like me to play for their wedding. The music is coming along, which is good. Typhoons continue to keep the weather cooler, and the rain turns everything such a lovely, deep shade of green. The fact that the river between the barangay and central Bayombong has swelled to four times its normal size makes things more interesting (and gave birth to the canoe above…). It is always something to wade through a dump on the commute to “work”.