in summary...

My confused body is alert at five this morning, so I can see the first sunlight falling into the fenced yards of my hometown. There's a crust of snow on my backyard pool. I'm still jet-lagging and hacking Calcutta smog out of my throat, but my family's home is nothing if not a place of rest, a good one.

There are endless stories I've neglected to tell here. There are endless ways to tell this year as a story. And the writer I want to become knows not only how to tell his own stories, but those of others too. But I just looked on the blog of a friend I made in Calcutta, and he's written more in his three weeks there than I have since I left last July. He's got links to the pages of other volunteers, and again I'm struck by the staggering abundance of words floating around the web, and the world. And I'm content to watch them float along and trust mine to come out in good time.

I've grown pretty fond of the blog medium and its lightly-edited position halfway between conversational chattering and careful composition. But I like conversations and careful writing even more, and the season's changing. Let me point once more to Hannah's blog. She's recently written about Calcutta, Bodhgaya, and Delhi, and she tells the stories well. Read the linked poem about the Jain Bird Hospital and her T.S. Eliot passage.

Thanks for listening.