Awaji Suspension Bridge

Before the longest suspension bridge in the world there were Skype chats with parents and friends, wishing a new year, recounting experiences and news of the recent past.  New voices and an understanding of the place from which another person comes, something as significant to understanding another as perhaps hearing their own voice and thoughts.  How our past and the web of people that we continue to know outside of our daily touch stay with us and shape us.  It seems a privilege to be able to share this inner shaping, to witness the landscape upon which another has formed themselves, even if only in a short conversation, even if only listening.  

And within one of these conversations was the sharing of a recent trip to New Orleans.  The tastes, the sounds, the sites, the history, and pictures.  Remembering a part of America that I only know very vaguely but witnessing it again, fresh against the backdrop of Japan.  As I've been coming to see the diversity here more and more clearly, I've started to think that perhaps it is as diverse as America.  There is so much that I don't know–from the intricacies of tea ceremonies I've yet experienced to the inexplicability of Japanese television humor that I can only vaguely garner.  How many types of people take pleasure in these myriad things, find meaning in different places?  But to hear of the south in New Orleans made me realize how little I know of my own country, how impossible it is to fully know the place from which one comes or in which one lives.  That exploration and learning, of places and people, can come from distant journeys or simply new ways of looking at what one assumed to be familiar.