I have been back in the U.S. for a few weeks, now--the longest stretch of time I have spent in the land of the "free" since May. And the first time I have truly re-settled somewhere here in several years. I have traded conversations with rural Mozambicans and bright-eyed college students from Beira for a sea of culturally experienced, diverse, and very bright worker bees who are hell-bent on saving the world from the consequences of global climate change. In a multi-million dollar building with a great porch, where I can still escape outside and read forest change and household welfare literature to my heart's content under the eaves until it starts getting too cold here on Cape Cod to do so (just to clarify...that is where I work, not where I live... ;) ).

I love all of my realities of the past year and a half: my house full of melodramatic Brazilian women with the slightly-too-laid-back landlord and the lab in Belo Horizonte full of good-natured programmers and spatial modelers, my self-sufficient, on-the-go self that (sometimes) feels the adrenaline rush at the thought of showing up in a new city or a remote village and feeling so very out of place. The staying put in one place until I've got those people who surround me that I can dial up after a couple of beers at 2am--who don't mind if I drop by their house insanely early without knocking and hang out with their pets--the comfort of having another place (group of people?) that I refer to as "home". The visits to my other homes that have built me up and rejuvenated me--times with my family, Jer, Aurora, Kerry, Rebekah, Callie, Matt, Christa etc. in the past year that have blurred the present and the past, and reminded me of the ways in which the people in my life have shaped my experiences so completely.

It gets confusing though--sometimes I feel like I am simultaneously so sure of who I am and what it is that drives me--what I need, want, and have to give-- and so very uncertain about my ability to do everything that I aspire to, well. Life, love, social change. Being a scientist, a girlfriend, a friend, a sister, a daughter, someone who moves, someone who stays put. Someone who lives in the moment, and someone who sets goals and invests in the things that she values; who integrates all of the things she sees and does in order to do these things more wholly. Takes all of these different realities and lets them shape her into someone stronger. A better academic. A more intuitive person. Someone who listens and absorbs more fully, cries more often, allows herself to be angry occasionally, acknowledges that she has fears, and embraces confusion and insecurity. I want to be this someone...but also someone who lets my hope and my intuition--not my confusion, my insecurity, my fear, or my anger--inspire the way that I live my life.