April 28, 2008. In exactly four months I will be, in all likelihood, on a plane leaving my world and all I know and love behind. I must be crazy. Who in their right mind willfully goes to be alone in a foreign land, in full knowledge of the fact that they will be unable to communicate properly for weeks and months? This isn’t sane. This isn’t normal. This is the first time in my life I’ve taken a step completely in the dark and totally unaware of where my feet will fall — be it on solid ground or nothing at all. I feel like I’m back at the top of that 20 foot cliff in eastern Washington, standing at the edge, about to throw up. Except I never actually could bring myself to jump off that cliff. The eleven foot was fine, no big deal, but the 20 was always so much more difficult.

Dickinson would have been easy, would have been that eleven foot cliff. I would have jumped just fine, felt the water rush over me and would have pushed back up to the surface laughing. But Irkutsk, this is more difficult. Each day I creep closer to peek over the edge and wonder if I’ll survive. Sure, I’ve seen other people do similar things only to live and prosper, but they are not me. What happens if I leap wrong, or too close to the cliff side? What happens if I become so scared that I forget to swim when I hit the water? All of these fears that are so painfully clear atop that cliff in eastern Washington have such easy parallels to what I face now.

And what I must take from it is courage. While no, I was never able to bring myself to leap from that cliff, this is something entirely different. I look at my life and I know that I have been headed towards Russia for at least the last four years, if not longer. I have a strange sense of faith that this is a step, a leap, a jump that I must take. And from the cliff experiences I must take to heart that the only way to survive is to jump as far out as I can. Clinging to what is at home at all times will only make the pain more poignant and terrible. This is not to say that I will forget or move on from those I love at home, but that in order to continue to love and appreciate them, I must first survive the jump. I must do all that I can now to prepare for when I hit the water, so that after ten months I can breach the surface once more and return to all those that mean so very much to me back home — only to take the jump again.

And maybe in the end life is really all about those jumps of complete and total faith. We all have to bring ourselves to believe that what we are doing, where we are headed, no matter how scary and potentially life-altering, is where, what and who we need to be. These are the defining moments of our lives; when we throw out the “rule book,” when we throw away all that we think is sane and do what we believe we must. It is in these times when we truly find out who we are, because there is no way to know until you’re falling so you can see who you are once you pick yourself up again. Can I stand on my own two feet all alone in the Siberian wilderness? This is the test. And more than any in the past, it’s one I do not want to fail.