Slash and burn.

I'm in Denver, mountains in sight from the hostel window. I've spent a lot of time lately in the peaks, since it's healthy to go there once in a while and shake off the dust from the valley. I've changed my social environment and my residence, slammed the door on a lot of unsatisfying relationships, and have not made any particular effort to foster new ones. That's fine. But I have to return to the valley sometime.

I had a thought just before I sat down to write this, so I went outside for a smoke. Ran into an old colleague I almost never see. The fact that she was happy to see me, someone she only sees once a year at most, lifted my spirits, and I walked back upstairs. An image came to my mind on my way back up: a meteor punching through our thin eggshell of an atmosphere at a window-shattering 40,000 mph, a small boy standing on a mountaintop with a baseball bat, poised and ready to knock that rock back into space.

I asked myself: whatever happened to that boy?

I call it 'slash-and-burn agriculture of the soul'. Akhilandeshvari, a relatively less well-known Hindu goddess whose name means something like 'never not unbroken', would likely appreciate this metaphor: what I mean by it is that people like me tend to push themselves very very hard in frantic hot-blooded pursuit of a goal, an ideal, a target, and burn their souls to cinders in the process. But like the ashes from acres of macheted and burnt scrub, these are times in my life that ablate everything that needs torn down and rebuilt. Friendships that need to fade, jobs that need re-defined, plans that need re-drawn.

When I got on the plane yesterday, I felt like my entire grad school experience was an unmitigated failure. And, taken from a certain set of standards, it just might be: I have no publications to my name, no awards won, no exotic adventures gone on in the name of ethnography. Anthropology was interesting to me for a while, particularly since it answered some key questions I had when I first pursued it, but dammit, I want to slay some fucking dragons, and anthropology hasn't inspired me to slay any dragons lately. It did when I first moved into the Birdhouse, and I wanted to be Philippe Bourgois. I played chess with drug dealers and shared shitty beer with people who have it way way worse than I do, as a white male (albeit from a less than economically privileged background). It was good. But that time has been over for a while.

As for what's to come now, who knows? It's exciting, like looking at your hometown receding in the distance from under the wing of an Airbus. I might see snow here tomorrow. That's exciting. I didn't bring my boots. That's fine. I'm here with the all the cool-headed detachment of someone who's already broken up with someone, but just hasn't pulled the trigger yet. I'm slashing and burning like crazy these days, and marveling that such green shoots can spring up so quickly from between the still-smoldering cinders. Let it burn.