In roughly sixteen hours I’ll be saying my goodbyes and heading towards Chicago, where a rather large plane will be waiting to take me away.

When I was going through this process about three years ago, thinking about how I was leaving home for a year, I was an emotional mess. The thought of leaving everything familiar for lands unknown scared the dickens out of me. The year before that, when Tait and I were preparing to leave for two and a half months, I was even worse.

Knowing the way my mind works, I was mentally preparing for the emotional onslaught that was sure to come as the time to my leaving drew ever nearer. But oddly, with sixteen hours to go, I don’t really feel that. Instead, there’s a certain sense of calm and peace that seems to be enveloping me.

Perhaps it’s the fact that I’ve done all this before, that I know what to expect, and that I’m not so much leaving for a strange and foreign as I am returning to a second home. There’s also the fact that through careful planning and prioritizing I’ve managed to eliminate a host of last minute preperations, and am instead enjoying my last day simply organizing and doing some writing. Or maybe I’ve simply grown up a bit more since then.

Whatever the reason, or perhaps because of all those reasons, I feel like I’m leaving with a greater sense of resolve, and better idea of what I’m aiming for, and what I want to accomplish. It’s one of those rare introspective moments when you feel like everything around you is rushing past, while you’re simply standing still, taking it all in, and calming walking on. Like those movie scenes where the character is standing in a crowd, the masses swirling around, while they remain perfectly still and in focus.

I don’t yet know what God has prepared for me over there, across the sea. Much can happen in three years, and I’m sure God has much planned. But as the scenery changes around me, and a new landscape of possibilities opens up, I am happy that you can lay witness and bear testiment to this continual process in my life through the scope of this site.

Now there is calm and quiet, but I sense that a new time of busyness and movement is soon upon me.

The following is a collection of prose taken from the very first version of this site (copied here so as to save you the hassle and the certain defilement of innocence that would come from visiting yourself).

Images proceed, wrap around, and fall over again. Most of my life has been a clever pursuit of an image I have held inside of myself, one that with time I hope to more thoroughly realize. I spent the past year of my life studying 7000 miles away from home in a tiny city nestled away on a small island country out over the pacific. That tiny city was Tokyo. And that small county? Japan. Why my hopes and dreams should bring me so far from home is not something I readily understand.
But as I look to graduation, that small country ever looms before me. Taking these parts of my life that I identify with, growing up in a culture that I love and cherish, my hope and prayer is that these aspects of my life can be fully implemented and made use of in a country that thinks green tea is a tremendously good idea for an ice cream flavor. But you know what; it is.

My life has certainly taken some interesting turns. I had originally planned on completing a degree in Fine Arts upon entering college, but life has a funny way of keeping nothing constant. After my first year in college, I began to realize that the field I was majoring in would more then likely end in my unemployment, and so at that point I began to reevaluate some things. I began to look at where my passions were, and what I could do with my life that would keep me active as well as give me a sense of accomplishment. For me that choice was education. I loved not only being with children, but participating in their growth, teaching them new things, and giving them a love of knowledge and learning. My life took another step in world of complexity as my school life continued. Beginning first with a two month internship in Nagoya Japan, and continuing when I had the opportunity to study in Tokyo Japan for a year. My love for Japan has only been matched by my love for teaching, and seeing these two motivations in my life, I hope in the future to blend and integrate them together in a way that will complement each other. For me, that might mean pursuing a career in Japan, teaching English or something similar in the Elementary level. Finding a path that can make use of both of these parts of my life is something that I’m in continual pursuit of. I am confident of finding that path, and of spending a lifetime doing something I love.

Soft stir

As home drifts

Slowly into view

Warm hands

As yours to mine

Innocently drew

Into night

Our journey draws

A sharp but distant line

Light bends

Across the sky

As your star crosses mine

Shortly after I returned (about two weeks shortly) from Japan for the second time I was enrolled in a class at Western bearing the ominous title “technology for teachers”. At it’s heart I truly think this class meant well, but when the professors teaching the class know only slightly more than you do, and when the basic curriculum entails such difficult tasks as how to use a zip drive, and how to register yourself for an online service (both of which were all day events) you know it’s going to be a long semester.

The biggest project of the semester, and one of the few that actually held my attention, was to design and create your own webpage. Though there was specific guidelines about the content of the site (it was to be used as a kind of portfolio), I latched on to the concept with the idea of using it as a platform for exploring my time in Japan. The name I finally decided on for the site was Safely Framed.

As it was my first real time using dreamweaver, and possessing only a mediocre knowledge of html, if that, the framework of the site was pretty dismal to say the least. The background image featured a leaf motif; I think little else needs to be said. nevertheless, the content itself featured some dynamic images contrasting with some personal and intimate text, and I was overall pleased with my final product. Not pleased enough to let more than a handful of people set eyes on the site mind you, but pleased nonetheless.

When the time came to create a new website for my journey back to Japan, I ran through my head a number of different names and ideas. But the more I ventured into new avenues of inspiration, the more I found myself coming continually back to this odd little site I created as a little project for a class that I spent as much time playing solitare as I did creating programs. There seemed to be something fitting about preserving the name, and even more so the idea behind that original site, and documenting as much the progress and the journey from the time I got back from Japan, as the path leading back to it and beyond. Afterall, this desire to work and live in Japan was not simply some whim that I hit upon one day, but a very real progression that has been at work in my life for a very long time. That I’m returning there now is simply testiment to that fact.

That old site of mine is still up and running interestingly enough. For those faint of heart, I would reccomend staying well away, but for those unaffected by poor design or a lack of logic, please feel free to visit the site here.

Well you’re doing that though, I think I’m going to get some more packing done. Enjoy!