The Almighty Quickstep

Let's try this again, shall we?  With great intentions (delusions?) I began a blog a couple of years ago with an email address I can no longer access. I promptly posted nothing for two years while moving from Lacey, Washington (near where Puget Sound ends and the Olympic Peninsula begins) to the Arabian Peninsula and on to the Korean Peninsula a mere year later.  I lived on the Iberian Peninsula for a spell, too, as a young woman.  None of th
ese peninsular sojourns has been particularly planned in advance but all of them shaped my life in profound ways.  The title of the blog comes a quote by Kurt Vonnegut,

Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.

Vonnegut describes the totality of the experience of assimilating into a culture different from one's own. The sentence incorporates the missteps, the clumsiness, the wanting to go one way but going another, the crushed toes, the feeling of utter capriciousness, confusion and profound meaningfulness of finding one's self on the other side of the globe without quite having planned it.  I've often felt, in my travels, that I had been carried by some sort of divine river to just that place and time, that my presence here or there was somehow foreordained and part of a larger plan, but often that plan was illogical, incomprehensible and perhaps even ill-advised. Vonnegut puts it all into one sentence.  That's why he's Vonnegut and I'm not.

From a tiny temple near our home in Daegu

But I digress, I'm going to have another whirl at the blog.  Mostly what interests me is culture.  I see culture as the sum total of how a people have solved the problems unique to their geographical and historical situations.  I have no idea if that is how a sociologist would describe it, and I don't really care.  I am also more interested in deep culture.  In values and thinking patterns and the reasons behind 'why they do that' more than art and traditions and habits, unless the art and traditions and habits reflect culture.  So I will probably write about that.  I will also keep you up on what is happening with me.  Maybe.  If I can stick to it this time.  Here's hoping.