2006: the world is more than you know

This year a lot happened. With the new updated Blogger you can use the categories on the right sidebar to look through the posts for the past year. But here's a brief re-cap:

...went to the Calvin College Symposium on Worship, began collecting broken and damaged religious art...had a poetry reading at De Koffie Boon...drove down the West Coast with two of my best friends over Spring Break, made my first intaglio print, made my first plaster relief, had one of my poems put to music...performed in a modern dance, won an Honorable Mention in a student art show for one of my paintings, went again to Calvin for the Festival of Faith & Writing...met Nebraska State Poet William Kloefkorn, drove to Milledgeville, Georgia to research O'Connor's writing process and to hunt for broken religious art...worked as an assistant on a semi-professional independent film...ran into wildfires in western Nebraska, studied abroad my fall semester in Oxford...made my first collage, wandered art museums in Paris, saw Bill Viola's The Messenger...made some more collages safe at home before the year was out, applied to the Creative Writing programs at Minnesota and Iowa.

In the end, I saw a lot of country (most memorably, the beach in the redwoods of California and the Smoky Mountains in North Carolina) and so many different (and fascinating) people, from the waiter at the 24-hour Denny's in Oregon, to the shrewd junk dealer in Alabama, to the brilliant academics I studied with in Oxford. I tried more new things this year than I ever have. I had some very sad and frustrating times and also the most beautiful experiences of my life. I may not get to say that every year so I am thankful, for the adventure, the fragility.