I spent much of today thinking about home. And thinking about what I want to accomplish while I’m here. Thinking about why I came here and why I can’t seem to get over the awe of being in this beautiful new place and get down to what I need to be doing.

And why I can’t seem to be writing my blog even though I think and take notes daily about what I want to say.

I honestly really haven’t thought of home much at all until today. And then, while annoyed that I couldn’t bring myself to write this blog, I aptly got this line from one of my favourite poems by Allen Ginsberg called “America”. “I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.”

Since I’ve always had a mild issue with obsessive compulsive behavior, when I get a word or phrase or sound or image in my head, I tend to replay it in my mind over and over (and over and over). So today all I could think was “I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.”

But the issue is that when I feel most inspired to write, it’s usually when I’m riding my bike through Scheveningesbos (a beautiful small forest that separates Scheveningen from The Hague), while I’m on the beach with the sun on my face and the wind whipping my hair across my face or while I’m sitting around smiling at our roommates on the back porch of the house. Then later, back at my computer, my right mind has suddenly vanished.

And maybe there is just something so difficult about trying to convey to people the way in which you experience things. Another favourite quote of mine is from Joseph Conrad in The Heart of Darkness. “It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream–making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams…No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence–that which makes its truth, its meaning–its subtle and penetrating essence.”

I wanted this blog to be a look into what our experience abroad is like. But as usual I’m being too picky. And assuming that people are actually interested in reading such a thing.

But, Right mind be damned, I’d better get right down to the job.