Peregrination

Peregrination refers to a journey or pilgrimage, often religious in nature, that involves traveling from one place to another. It can also mean a wandering or roaming, often without a specific destination or purpose. The term is derived from the Latin word "peregrinus," which means "foreign" or "stranger."  

 - courtesy of the MerlinAI add-on

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This isn't my first blogging rodeo; I had another long ago, almost in another life one could say.  It was something I kept pretty diligently, but I stopped writing it over a decade ago.   It wasn't a planned thing.  The voice of that version of me just went silent. 

Today at a lunch meeting, someone suggested I might want to start a blog or some form of record about my upcoming time as Teacher of the Year, and I realized I had been thinking about writing again sort of out of the corner of my mind's eye.  Blogging has always been a good way for me to process what I am going through at the moment.  William Faulkner said, "“I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it," and a lot of the time, that holds true for me as well.  Since I know this part of my life is going to be filled with meaningful experiences, blogging would allow me to shift the pieces of all of it around until a pattern emerged and to share it all with anyone who might possibly care to come along for the ride.

Still, I did not want to return to the old blog; this "new me" deserves new space.  Returning to that other blog would be like moving into a house crowded with the belongings of others, someone else's photos in all the frames, someone else's clothes in every closet and drawer.  Here I am instead with the tech version of bare floors and plain white walls, open space, and no real furniture to speak of.  We'll see what it becomes in time as the boxes of experience are unpacked, as the souvenirs I pick up along the way are displayed.

The name was problematic, though.  As any story with magic can tell us, names have such power.  Tons of trite or edu-jargon phrases sprang to mind, but while my life as a teacher and this upcoming new life as a student will no doubt dominate most of the content here, I didn't want to limit it completely to that singular aspect. Therefore, after poking around with some ideas and a thesaurus, I turned to an old-fashioned work for traveling:  peregrination.  

I like everything about the definition above.  This phase of my life is about trying to move from one place to another, not so much physical location but from one state of being I am outgrowing to another, hermit-crab-like as I abandon the safety of a shell I've known for a long time for the chance at a place to expand.  The undefined nature of the journey in the definition also seems accurate since it seems like new opportunities are unfolding daily, shifting my path from where I thought I was going to destinations I sometimes didn't even know to dream of.  I feel a little like Robert Frost's "way leads on to way," choices and opportunities revealing new roads, maybe even a new version of myself if I can be brave enough to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

So here we are, peregrinating together.  Gentle reader, if you're curious about what this will be about, you can expect to see glimpses of a teacher who loves her calling even when it wears her down to the bones, a rapacious reader and borderline melomaniac, an unexpected representative of her state as Teacher of the Year, a once-and-future grad student, and above all, a deeply-flawed person who is trying her best.  Keep me company awhile if you like.  I'll be glad to have you along.