What is audacity?

Well, friends, like I promised, I have begun a blog about my my life and times in Africa. I feel a little audacious, undergoing this extremely unique journey to Zambia.

Audacious: extremely bold or daring; recklessly brave; fearless. Well, I do not feel quite fearless, but I do feel extremely bold to strike out towards a completely unknown world, much like how Ulysses felt in Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem.

"Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well on order smite
The sounding of furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars until I die."

Audacious: extremely original; without restriction to prior ideas; highly inventive. I seek to be highly original-to think of the idea that no one has thought of yet. A good friend and original thinker told me once on a balmy night in Washington, D.C. that I should never give up on pursuing an original idea because they are the only ones that have ever changed the world. "A long flight across the night. You know why late night flights are good? Because we cease to be earthbound and burdened by practicality. Ask the impertinent question. Talk about the idea no one has thought of yet. Put it a different way. Be poets." A rather profound discussion during the West Wing TV show.

Audacious: recklessly bold in defiance of convention, propriety, law, or the like; insolent; brazen. In defiance of convention, yes. But not necessarily insolent or brazen. Bold, yes. But not without regard for others and their feelings.

Audacious: lively; unrestrained; uninhibited. Absolutely. I seek this adventure in Africa in order to break from conventional career paths and carve out a unique and vivacious direction for my life, to learn important things about myself and those around me, and to witness and experience the human condition in a way that I cannot without leaving home; to become a visionary. Some may see it as impractical, but I feel differently.

In the poem Ulysses, Tennyson describes the discontent and restlessness of Ulysses to explore again. I long to experience the adventure of travel to far away lands again, to live in a unfamiliar place, under the gaze of the same sun and moon as the place I am from, but somewhere where a vast chasm divides the two.

But for me it is also a longing to reunite with myself and redefine my purpose-the reason God has placed me here on earth. Pablo Neruda describes my insaciable need to leave again and again, in search of something through my wanderlust:
"De un viaje vuelvo al mismo punto,
por que?
Por que no vuelvo donde antes vivi,
calles, paises, continentes, islas,
donde tuve y estuve?
Por que sera este sitio la fontera
que me eligio, que tiene este recinto
sino un latigo de arie vertical
sobre mi rostro, y unas flores negras
que el largo invierno muerde y despedaza?"

So I bid the Pacific Northwest and my family goodby in search of something that I know to be true, but something that only my soul knows, only something that it whispers to me that I cannot verbalize to anyone else. I will return here, to the place of my childhood and the memories that those closest have created, in my mind frequently over the next few years while I am away. Each of you will go with me to this far away land, and my love for you will sustain me until I see you again.