Testing. Testing...Is this thing on?

It was Herman Melville that said “All profound things and emotions of things are preceded and attended by silence." 

Right now, I am sitting near my front window and watching the most spectacular sunset as it changes the sky from a dusty orange, to dusty rose and now a brilliant neon pink. One cloud is low and back and from the top is flecked with blue and navy while it's underside is fascinatingly flamingo. The clouds are the perfect shape and have metallic linings and texture and there really isn't anything better than a sunset in the west. Couple that with a picture window framing all this splendor above aspens and juniper and I'm arguably in heaven.

 I still love birthdays and make a big deal of them for others and for myself. Of all the profound things and emotions of things that have been attended by silence one is that I've gotten married. Of all my years, apparently that birthday at the start of 32 was the beginning of a year that would change the rest of my life in a very apparent way. It's amazing to me how familiar a stranger can feel in such a short time, and how recognizable he was to me even from the very beginning. Adam Phillips can sum up my feelings in a much more poetic way, "You feel as though you have known them forever, and yet, at the same time, they are quite foreign to you." 

So yes, life is very different now than it was when I left off writing in November of 2015. Other profound things are that I am now better rooted in Utah. In terms of the emotions of things, my job has been a roller-coaster of struggle with some flecks of triumph that I continually have trouble trusting are not a figment of my imagination. I have a team of students that I love dearly and at the same time wrestle with how to make sure they are moving toward their greatest potentials as scientists and as people. Research has come at me with the ferocity of an ocean - one in which seems completely unruly and overwhelming, but once you get in you recognize that you indeed can still swim and that the sound is more terrifying than the water.  I have taught a number of classes now and even then, there are times when I love my job and feel great at it, and other times I am crestfallen at the despair and spite that my students express toward me in their evaluations despite my best efforts to help them do well. 

I'm not sure how much I will write. I miss it. It was a needed outlet for so much of my graduate school days. It was a way to remember my loved ones who were so far away and to process the battlegrounds of success and failure on my way to a career. I am finding that I still need an outlet to remind myself that I can still be a whole person with a love of books and the outdoors, a love of musing and commenting on the things that I'm reading and thinking about. Blogs are much a thing of the past. In a way, I think that makes this easier for me to know that very few people are listening which gives me a bit more freedom to just write for me. I'm still balancing life with an affair of chemistry and the lab and trying to figure out where that balance exists. I'm still writing to understand life and how to pull all the fragmented parts of it together. And so, on we go...