As most of you now know, my new web site is up and running. Of course there have been glitches and hiccups but that’s all normal. I hope you like this new site as much as I do. It is such a breath of fresh air with its lightness and color.
I have been putting off writing a blog because basically, I resist change and I hate having to slow down and learn new things. I just like to do. So I haven’t taken the time to look through the tutorials long enough to write a blog. Like I said I am resistant to change and get annoyed when I have to stop long enough to learn something new.
So with that in mind I have to really stop in my tracks and look at my life. I am resistant to change? Who am I kidding?
On Sept 4th this year I packed a suitcase and left the USA headed back to the land of my birth and upbringing- Kuala Lumpur Malaysia. It takes 24 flying hours to get from Detroit to Kuala Lumpur. I have made this journey almost every single year since I left as a teenager to study dance in London. The pull home has always been a powerful one. I have travelled with babes in arms, first one then two and then three of them, alone for business or with the whole family for vacations. After 25 years in the States and with two kids off leading their own lives, I knew the time had come to go home.
So here I am, set up for the time being in my mother’s flat in the middle of the beautiful city of Kuala Lumpur. How fitting too that this flat is on the street that I grew up. My childhood home, once almost in the country is now gone, in its place apartment blocks reaching for the sky.
I am learning to live in a big city. Learning to love the noise and the smells and the busyness of it all. And learning to LOVE it. I sit on my tiny verandah and watch life hurl by. So different from small town America. I am remembering the smells of Asia, the different languages, the “manglish” that I speak. I am breathing it all in with a sense of peace and contentent. I am finally where my heart has been all of these years.
I have started running in the early mornings to avoid the traffic and I run with the bats that swoop low over my head, avoiding the rats crawling out of the monsoon drains, startled by my presence, listening to the call to prayer from the mosque vieing with the call of the rooster. Ah, only in Asia!
I am eating hot,spicey food and luscious fruit, enjoying the sun everyday, and trying to drive through monsoon rains that cover my windshield like a blanket. I drive like a maniac (read Malaysian) scaring my 16 year old daughter into NEVER learning how to drive :). I have been up into the hills steeping myself in the mysteries of the billion year old rain forest, listening to the whoop of the monkeys as they swing from tree to tree. I have sat on white sandy beaches, burning in the tropical sun, licking the salt off my lips. I am shopping in exquisite malls with the top end designer shops (but buying my clothes elsewhere!)
But most of all, I am deeply grateful for the fact that I can call my brother up and meet him for a drink or stop at my mother’s flat after school pickup to just hang out. Or take my mother shopping and have lunch with her. Or call my brother with a work question, Or have them both to dinner. They are no longer half a world away.
And the friends I went to school with. After over 40 years of long distance, sporadic friendship, to have them all so close. To be able to meet them at a drop of a hat, to reconnect, to have so much love around me is intoxicating and renewing.
So I have made some changes here in my life. I have not been resistant to them and I am wondering now, what took me so long.
Life is so very, very good.