Change, Changes, Changing

I feel...joy. Passion. Like I want to laugh really loud and whoop and holler and sing spirituals. I feel humbled, and thankful. I feel hopeful, but also sobered by tasks ahead and the scary things on our horizon...climate change, energy crisis, the economy, social security, on and on...I am daunted by the prospect of my generation solving these problems. The buck must stop with us. I know this is a day for celebration, but I know that it is also a day in which we must realize that even when we are led by supported leader with the gift to inspire us, someone with a vision and purpose, we still have many obstacles to surmount and dilemmas for which there are no easy answers. Hope will sustain us, but only effort will bring change.

It was great to be surrounded by people watching history unfold today. I tried to notice the details and lock them away in my brain. This is the first presidential election I've been able to vote for. We are a generation marked by such staggering events - since I was thirteen it has seemed as though we are a nation of youth perched on the cusp of great change, poised to inherit a new world. Perhaps it is typical to feel this way in the bright blossum of life, to be twenty-something and dangling over the precipice of adulthood. I think about my grandmother, a high-school dropout who married at seventeen, just a few months before her young husband went off to war, a tail-gunner shot down in the pacific who never came home. THAT's a world I can't comprehend. Talk about feeling like everything is about to change - her life is wrapped up in our country's history like threads in a scarf with no end.

The changes extend to our own little home here at Lehigh. Monday I took part in the first of six workshops with the playwriting candidates. Jorge was very approachable and most of what he said was straitforward and sensible. I felt as though I didn't get enough interaction with him, however - it was a great example of how he works, and I appreciated the idea of a physical warm-up and mind-centering exercise before sitting down to write, it put me in a good space to create. But was that the best use of his time? I don't know. It must be a very difficult task to relate to us in such a short time. I'm looking forward to the other five candidates and how they'll approach this difficult assignment we've given them.