Out Beyond Ideas

Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing,
there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase
each other
doesn't make any sense.

-Rumi

Lives of great people all remind us, we can make our lives sublime,
and, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Although as long as I've got this platform, I'm going to use it to vent. I'm waiting to hear back about one of the fellowships I applied for; I had emailed the woman in charge to ask when we would find out about it and she responded that all applicants would be notified by the week of 3/12. That's today. So I assumed that I would be notified Friday, and subsequently spent all day in front of my computer, staring at my inbox, willing that email to show up.

It didn't.

So I assumed that it instead meant that I would find out today. Inbox-watching resumes.

Still no email.

So apparently "by the week of" means "anytime during that week, and quite possibly after it," because that's just the way my luck goes.

Grrrrrr!

I NEED to find out if I received this fellowship because I can't officially make a call on whether this trip will happen until I know if I can pay for it, which I won't know until I find out about this fellowship.

And I desperately need to start knocking out all the small little details like buying plane tickets as soon as possible, but I can't do that until I've officially accepted the volunteer position with the NGO in Kabul, which I can' t do until I know if I'll actually be there for certain.

So I'm going slightly insane at the moment. I hate having everything up in the air like this. I'm not an impulsive person. I hate surprises. I'm a planner. I stay sane by planning out every detail so there are no surprises. However, until I know WTF is going to happen in my future, I can't plan anything and it is making me crazy.

It's bad enough that I'll be returning from Afghanistan in September with no home, no job, and no money. That is already keeping me up nights. I don't need all this extra tension too.

It's been a while...

Both since I last updated and since I've posted any of my old photos from Afghanistan. Which is rather odd considering how much Afghanistan has been on my mind while planning for this summer's stay. So in honor of my upcoming second amazing (hopefully; and hopefully I won't be using another adjective to describe it once I return) experience there, I'm posting one of my favorite photos from my last trip. These are students at a girls' school we visited in Kabul.