an ode to 'juan de fuca'

This weekend I went to the Juan de Fuca festival and it was fabulous.


I saw friends, I saw students, I saw fellow faculty members and I felt strong.

Strong to know that I am part of a community that prizes the arts.

Strong to know that we as a group of people enjoy being around each other, enjoy partaking of events together, enjoy watching grannies shaking their booties by belly dancing, enjoy weird foods and expensive ice cream cones, enjoy watching children do backbends and chase each other around trees. We are a people who enjoy being around other people.

It’s true: how can you not be happy walking through a bizarre unless you are half dead? How can you not enjoy dazzling your eye with new sights and stimulating your ear with new sounds and tantalizing your palate with new tastes? How can you not be happy seeing people laughing together, teasing each other, spotting each other from across the esplanade and smiling, waving, gesticulating, and gesturing that this is it! this is the place to be! What other place can you be on this fine weekend on the Olympic peninsula?

I tell you, my friends, it’s good to get out. it’s good to change your perspective. It’s good to see new visions of a world outside this world. Living on the peninsula you can get a bit cutoff. You can drive up and down the main highway from sequim to port angeles so many times that your eye doesn’t even see anything new. Everything looks the same. The people look the same. Your eye spots the same ‘traylor’s restaurant’ one too many times. you glance over at the balding auto insurance salesman one too many times and pretty soon you are convinced there is no way out. there is nothing new in this world. This is it. this is the end.



But it’s not the end, my friend. It is just the beginning. And it is high time that you start stretch yourself. maybe you do stay up too late and spend too much money at a festival like the juan de fuca but in the end what you have to take with you is more than caramel kettle corn and an overpriced ecuadorean sweater. You have memories, my friend. My memories as well as something show off to your friends the next time you see them! So, go out! be free! Enjoy the world! Stop getting in that holding pattern that you’ve been in and DO SOMETHING NEW!