Wandering Again

Well, dear friends, summer has begun and I, once more, am getting out my traveling shoes. A project I devised was chosen to be funded by the Salisbury Fellowship, and I will be found in Tibet for the upcoming two months. Included in my proposal for this trip was a blog, so, in order to dedicate an entire page to the experience, I will be taking a summer-long hiatus from Tilting at Windmills. So, change your bookmarks! I will be writing at http://thoughtsonshangrila.blogspot.com.

And thus I bid the sun-ripe strawberries of Oregon adieu, and welcome the unknown. Huzzah.

Pomp and Circumstance

"Farewell the neighing steed, and the shrill trump,

The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife,
The Royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, Pomp, and Circumstance of glorious war!"

-Shakespeare, Othello

Pomp and Circumstance (the march) wasn't played last Friday at honors convocation, but the phrase, I feel, is a fitting of my current situation. According to Wikipedia, "pomp and circumstance" implies a critique of the "'shows of things': the naïve assumption that the splendid show of military pageantry - 'Pomp' - has no connection with the drabness and terror - 'Circumstance' - of actual warfare." Let me explain.

Pomp

I love it when the professors process. They all dress up in their academic garb and march across the green and growing quad of late spring, toward the chapel. Then they sit in the choir pews, and we, the honored ones, congregate and face our teachers. Names are named, and inspiring speeches are spoken. Education, they say, really is a beacon of illuminating truth, and it doesn't take much imagination for me to see myself at Hogwarts.

Circumstance

Tomorrow finals begin. Last night I slept for three hours, and I awoke with call numbers--which I had written on my hand for lack of paper--smeared across my face. I sit in the library struggling to wrap my head around the epistemological implications of religious pluralism and the inscrutable Zen of Dōgen, on occasion eeking out a laborious sentence. And, on top of it all, I sustained a severely sprained ankle at Frisbee nationals, and I'm clomping around campus in an ungainly boot.

Ah, the glories of war.