thoughts, words, deeds

worlds and stories later

Fun Fact Friday! On this day in 1454, Amerigo Vespucci was born in Florence, Italy...Matthias Ringmann, a German mapmaker, named the American continent in his honor. What unexpected places have your personal explorations led you to?

Another mapmaker! In under a week. Apparently March is full of them. Or maybe it’s the whole year, and I’m just becoming aware of them in March.

Okay, there are a few ways I can take personal explorations—the most obvious being traveling. Generally, when I travel, it’s been planned for ages. There were a couple of road trips in college that weren’t, of course, because who plans when they’re in college.

The first was in December. It was the reading day before finals, and a bunch of us wanted out of town, because—well, it was the day before finals. So, about eight of us from the dorm pack up our bags for two days and head into the mountains to a little cabin one of the girls’ families owned. Did I mention December? The roads were plowed, but the snow was deep enough that the mailbox was covered—so it was a good thing the driver knew where we were going. So, here, my personal exploration led me to a day in the snow with a bunch of other girls. There was hot chocolate involved. And snowball fights and a snowman family. We got back to campus refreshed and unstudied.

The other that I remember more clearly was in April. Again, it was just before finals and a bunch of us wanted out of town (which is a recurring theme in college), so about twelve of us got in three cars with tents and headed to Zion’s so we could climb Angel’s Landing. On the way down, our driver had to talk us out of a ticket, which was unfair, because we really were going with the traffic. It wasn’t our fault that the traffic was going twenty-five miles over the speed limit.

We roasted hot dogs and marshmallows and slept in a tent, and the next day we went up the mountain as a group. I was one of the less fit people, so I brought up the rear most of the way up, and up. Lots of switchbacks on that trail, and then at the top, you head out to the point along a trail that has three hundred foot drops on both sides. It made me wonder how Dad had gotten Mom out there on their honeymoon (she doesn’t hike. or camp). Going down went quicker, although the trail was a bit damp because it rained while we were descending. And then we went back to campus. So, there my personal explorations led me to a hike and sore muscles just in time for finals. And an opportunity to see a place that has personal connection to my family.

But I have to admit, a lot of my personal explorations have taken me through books, not through roads at all. For example, one semester, I had to write a twenty-five page essay on Shakespeare. I chose Much Ado about Nothing, because I like that play, and then I started reading the literature I could find about the play and marriage and 16th c England until I came up with a thesis (which involved the two major marriages in the play and the fact that marriage in Shakespeare’s time was acknowledged to have two parts, the public and the private—I could go on, of course. For twenty-five pages, at least). And then I did my best to prove that thesis in twenty-five pages, which was difficult, but I learned a lot about marriage and the play and what I wanted my marriage to contain—and other things like that.

Once we add in explorations on the internet (which begin with a simple question and end hours and stories later)—well, personal exploration through words is something I believe in. And they’ve led me here, to this blog post, in my bedroom at my laptop—worlds and stories later.