as a wise viking once told me, “who knows, australia may be your way home.”  eight more weeks until i bid melbourne adieu.  the intensity i am enduring is hardly bittersweet.  take the sensation of your happiest memory, mix it with clumsy nervousness and then shake it with bubbles of laughter.  stir in a pinch of hypertension and slowly pour it all over a tall glass filled with emotional rocks.  sip it with enjoyment and tender care because a glass half empty is never truly full either.

but let’s put the drink away and focus on something with more symbolic worth for navigating the world: the boomerang.

a hunting device rooted in australian tribal origins, the flying tool follows an elliptical path, always returning to its place of origin after its travels.  what fascinates me is what happens to the boomerang between the moment she is thrown to the moment she is caught, cradled back in safe arms.  do her curves change?  do her instincts deepen?  do the hunters give way to gatherers?  rested, she’ll catch a tailwind … ready to roam once again.

learning from the nature poet, ralph waldo emerson, she knows she’s right when painful boomeranging is endured no more:

all my life i had been looking for something, and everywhere i looked someone tried to tell me what it was.  i accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory.  i was naive.  i was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which, i and only i could answer.  it took me a while and much painful boomeranging of my expectation to achieve a realisation everyone else appears to have been born with: that i am nobody but myself.    (r.w.e.)

it’s been three years and i’m still looking.  i’ll always be looking.  but i know that it is time to get going.  my boomerang tucked into my back pocket i ask my australian beauties to give me a little nudge, toss me up into the air, but please do listen for the whispering echoes of wooden thistles as you’ve taught me that i am nobody but myself and this happy boomerang will retrace her elliptical path back to you one day.

yet for now … get this girl back to her native tundra, dress her head to toe in a canadian tuxedo and find her a lumberjack to ask her to dance.