I might live in New Zealand.

Tomorrow, the sun will still be sleeping when my parents take me to the airport. A new adventure is about to begin, and several thoughts and emotions are swirling around in my little head. I'm sure anyone my age, any recent graduate of college, has been thinking the same thing - where do I go from here? Where do I live? What do I do? And we are all on a constant search for identity and purpose no matter our age.

For a week or so, I have thought about this blog, and several of you reading this have asked me to put a blog up to keep you updated. I have wondered what the focus should be here - what my focus should be as a completely new and different chapter of my life-story begins. So the theme appears out of all the fears and questions that come with moving to a new country: "There I might live."

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau begins by writing about how "men labour under a mistake" - how we work so hard all our lives without taking time to live. This is sometimes chosen for us by society, and we cannot break out. He gets to a chapter entitled Where I lived, and what I lived for, where he decides what he wants to do with his life and where he wants to live it. Here is what has caught my attention:

"At a certain season of our life we were accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house. In imagination I have bought all the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and I knew their price... Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a house but a sedes, a seat? -- better if a country seat. I discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought far from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it. Well, there I might live, I said; and there I did live, for an hour, a summer and a winter life."
                                                                                                                - Thoreau, Walden


My mother has always said that home is where the people you love are. And that's true. My goal is that no matter where I live in the world, I will love the people there, and that will become my home - if only for "an hour, a summer and a winter life". Wherever I sit, there I will live, and there I will love.

So tomorrow, I fly out to Auckland, New Zealand. There I will live for about a year. You can read the chronicles of my life in this blog, and know that I love you as well - that you are also my home.