Genesis of a Name

When I first created this blog, I gave it some pithy name like "The Adventures of David and Liz" or "Musings from a Tropical Island" or something equally uninventive and unoriginal. And that was fine. This blog is written solely for my own enjoyment and for the enjoyment of my friends and family so it didn't really need a catchy, memorable name. But then I decided to re-vamp my blog about a year ago and I chose a new layout that allowed me to use a photo at the top of my page. Instead of using some cheesey photo of David and I, I picked the one you still see up top. It's a shot I took at Fredericksburg when my parents and I were visiting the Civil War battlefields of Virginia. I loved the look of the dirt road, the weather-beaten fence, and the wildness of the green grass and stormy sky. When I think of the journey of life, I often envision an unpaved road and so it seemed appropriate to use such an image for a blog of my day-to-day life.

The image, in turn, brought to mind a line from a poem by William Butler Yeats which perfectly described the picture I had chosen. Lest you think I am a great reader of poetry, the truth is that I pulled the line from The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, which starts each chapter with a poem or song lyric. The only poet I read with any real passion is Emily Dickinson, although I do love certain poems. I've just always preferred prose to poetry. I did track down the source of this line that I love so well and here it is:

The Rose of the World

WHO dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
For those red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna's children died.

We and the labouring world are passing by:
Amid men's souls, that waver and give place
Like the pale waters in their wintry race,
Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,
Lives on this lonely face.

Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode:
Before you were, or any hearts to beat,
Weary and kind one lingered by His seat;
He made the world to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet.

In any case, before I knew what I was doing, I inserted the quote into my blog and re-titled it "wandering feet," thinking that I could change the name at any time. But I've grown rather fond of the quote and the name and so I think it will stay. I do, after all, have quite the wandering feet.

Since graduating high school in 2001 (can you believe it's been 8 years?), I've lived in four different states and two different countries. I always knew I would never be one of those people who stayed in the town they grew up in. But I certainly never expected to live in Monterey, Hawaii, or South Korea. I dreamt of living in Rome and Washington, D.C. and I did. I've lived places I did not particularly like and I've lived places that thrilled me to no end. I've moved away from a place, glad to be moving on, only to realize later how much I had loved living there and wanted desperately to return. I've lived in exciting, fast-paced, crowded cities, and small, quiet communities and grown from each experience. I've lived close to family and friends and moved to places where I did not know another soul. It's amazing how you can live in a place for a year and never feel like it is truly home, and then move to a foreign country and feel like it's the place you truly belong.

Korea is like that for me. It's so new and so different and so 100% foreign to me and yet everyday here is a joy and everyday I grow to love it a little bit more. I knew when I married David that Asia was in my future (since he speaks Korea and Mandarin Chinese) and Korea feels like just the beginning of our Asian adventures. The frightening and exhilarating thing is that I have absolutely no idea where we'll go next, where we might end up. But I can't wait to experience it all. Isn't it amazing where life takes you sometimes?