and these things, too

You know when you have a craving for something and you can’t quite figure out what will satisfy that I-need-it-right-now feeling?  I crave a lot of things in my day to day:  chocolate (every day, but easy to satisfy), carbs (after a workout, but so bad for me), a quick commute home (every day, but never going to happen), a kiss (often, but we won’t go into that), a spilling souls conversation, a hug, fingers laced with mine, a boy with a guitar on a stage singing to me (and only me, it sometimes feels), a glass of wine that sets the world back on its axis, and those things and these things and all things, too.  Lately I have had a craving that I couldn’t (can’t) place, can’t figure out how to satisfy it, but I think I’m onto something with this writing thing.  It feels so good to write, to put words to your thoughts and feelings and form sentences, playing with words, their cadence, their figure, their imperfection and their perfection, too.  I teach this every day to my 92 teenagers who sit in my classroom and roll their eyes and fight me with every brush of Ticonderoga number 2 lead against their black-and-white-marble-cover composition books, but they do it and later they are better writers than when they started, and they are proud of what they are able to do, whether they ever admit that or not.  I teach them to play with words and sentence structures, taking risks and getting out of the box.  So here I go, too, doing myself what I want them to do.  I am going to play with words and phrases and clauses and sentences, and my muse will be my own life, perhaps scratching this proverbial itch I’ve had to just get out there.  But what a scary thing it is, to put it down on the page, even if it is only a journal you keep in your bedside drawer that probably no one will ever see, but you think that maybe someone will see it one day and judge you or wonder about you in ways you don’t want them to, so still I find myself filtering my private thoughts in that private venue.  What, then, is my solution?  A worldwide blog…ha!  (shoulder shrug)  Somehow this feels better, and I remember this summer the warm feeling I had when I wrote about my travels through Spain and Italy and people read them and commented and I felt whole.  So here I go, playing with the idea of writing again, and doing it in a most vulnerable way, but loving it all the same. I’m going to keep the title of this blog–Jillian’s Travels–because isn’t that what we do?  We travel.  We may never leave a place, but we travel through life with our experiences, our wishes, our dreams and hopes and mistakes and regrets and our relationships and our loneliness.  That’s traveling.