I'm beginning to realize that I've embarked on a journey to the furthest reaches of the human spirit. I am allowing this place to change me. I'm being open. Open as a person, and not thinking as a photographer who wants that heart-wrenching image. I know these kids. They know me. It's like having 500 of the cutest nieces and nephews I've ever laid eyes on. I spent an hour today just carrying three of the rowdiest kids in the hospital around upside down by the legs (they were healthy siblings of the sick in-patients...I imagine it must get boring in that hospital for a healthy 3 year old). My life is changing, because this place is changing me. And I think I'm figuring out that if you just allow the world to change you, you can really start to change the world...well, you can definetely feel like you're making a difference...a kind of small splash in an immense ocean of chaos. When the river floods here in Siem Reap, which is almost at least once a day, you can either look at it and feel like you could sink in it, or feel like you could walk right across it. I'm not trying to sactify what my role is here....I'm saying, the lows are LOW and the highs are HIGH. There's not much in between ground. All the "in between" is filled with confusions and miscommunications and feeling lost (all that stuff that comes with being a stranger in a strange land).
I was sitting in my room the other night thinking, "I feel different". My heart feels better. I think that the day I went to Art School, something happened to me. Art School did a lot for me, but it also did a lot to me. And whatever it was that I lost there in those walls, I've gotten back here. My heart just doesn't beat like it used to. I feel strong. And I feel aware, for the first time in a long time, of everything that's happening around me, in me, everywhere. I think I've spent a lot of time looking for the answers, and then trying to convince myself that I wasn't (when I still was). But the answers just don't matter anymore...because they're rarely ever right, they always come too late, and you only get to one of them by way of about 1,000 questions.
