Never forget

Everybody told me it was a sure thing. I was crazy not to think I'd be accepted. I had just returned from Mexico--my self-given, and, accepted graduation present... To say the least, I was on cloud 9...septimo cielo. I arrived home late with my dad from the airport...everyone else was asleep. Like the maidenly father Ed is, he offered to make me something to eat. (Which, now, appears to be one of the finest luxuries life has to offer. Even as a 21-year-old college graduate, my father still picked me up from the airport and made his little girl a midnight snack). Life in Mexico for 5 days without technology was both a gift and a burden. Therefore, on the web I went. I had a message...from CIEE. "Update about your Teach in Spain application."

Holy shit...this. is. IT. 

Tiny earthquakes shot through the nerve-endings in my fingers. I eagerly hesitated, but the suspense was too much too endure any longer...

"Dear Courtney,

Congr---"

And that was all she wrote. I nearly collapsed from euphoric suffocation. I was confused..my brain didn't know whether to cry, run naked in proclamation down the street, or to smile satisfactorily to myself in my reflection on the computer screen. Following suit of my childhood ways, I ran into the kitchen exulting what I could not verbalize with what can only be described as squealing, celebratory, 5-year old, ijustrodemyfirstpony jumps.

"I'm doing it! I got accepted! I'm going to Spain!!!"

....

That was 9 months ago. If I had ever had the privilege to have studied abroad during college, I would've been back home by now... I would've stopped when I had just began. I have a life here...People keep asking me how I know Spanish so well...they are convinced i studied it in college. And I look at them puzzlingly.. "I don't," I consistently respond. But, once it becomes a daily affirmation from those who have known me since day one to the pharmacist (Who told me on Monday, the words travelled through her warm tunnel of a smile " Your Spanish is much better than the first time we met...your pronunciation has improved greatly." The lady next to me chimed in to comment on how difficult it is to learn Spanish here in Andalucia, to which I quickly responded with, at least I understand it, rather than living in Madrid where I would easily be able to understand everything), you start thinking to yourself, "Am I really doing it?!"

These little pieces of my life are building a mountain in my soul. Our life is this strangely arranged mountain range. Each mountain represents a different experience--the climb, the revelation, and the reflection. My mountains are lush. They have been built on seeds of intrinsic motivation that I was so fortunate to receive as an innate gift. There are so many that never get to travel, and, on the other hand, there are those that travel with unconscious frequency. But, what makes my lone travel mountain so abundant in growth is the appreciation for its existence. Nature is a miracle. Technology is a gift. Nature was here long before I could express nature as a metaphor using a stone tablet, quill and ink, ballpoint pen, typeface, and today, touch-screen. Those things that surpass our beings--that make us feel infinitely small, yet, so immensely ourselves at the same time--originate in the origin of time...in what makes us all human...language, expression, face-to-face contact. Otherwise, your mountains are constructed from 0's and 1's in an alter-universe whose growth, experience, and reflection leaves you without the impressed memory that lives within you, the places you go, the people you meet, and the experiences you have.