random thursday morning

I miss Cambodia...I miss Nimol, I miss Chan - I wonder how she and her two daughters are doing. I miss the noodle breakfast and assing-kicking vietnamese coffee. I miss the sounds of the hospital first thing in the morning. I miss not hanging out with the kids at the orphanage on tuesday afternoons. I miss the bloody heat.

Sometimes I feel like I let people down by not going back sooner, by not stretching myself that much more. It feels terrible. It makes want to cry.

I am thinking about it more these days again.I contemplate going to Cambodia in the next 3 months. The idea leaves me feeling exhausted. I don't understand it, but I trust my internal checking system enough to know its not time yet.

Here, in Calgary, things don't have that edge and or that intensity. That sense of immedicacy doesn't exist here and it makes time expand and get thick...sometimes even slow. There is something here, right now, that works for me...maybe it's Lee's cooking, maybe it's the mountains. For now I am here, exploring the western landscape, reading Anja's blog from Kabul and writing letters with my Cambodian friends who continue to live their realities which I, a "Westerner", percieved as such a struggle. And yet when I read their letters I relate to the way they describe their days, their lives, their wonders, their worries and problems. I love having this awareness so vividly at the forefront - that we are really not that different.