Exploration

So I'm new to blogging and am not sure anyone will actually read this, but now that I have words I need a place to put them. I have a journal and write in it regularly. Lately, though, I have more reasons to write than usual and I think blogging will give me the extra incentive, and space, to let my thoughts spill over so my mind isn't spinning with quite so much information.
What's prompted the flow of words? In part it's this past year of life, a year during which God opened the world to me and said "taste, see, hear, feel the freedom". All of this came through an intense experience of change, community, spiritual deepening--the list goes on.
The words are also coming since a group of friends prompted me to start writing more than academic papers. They've prodded and supported as I've tentatively penned my way into the world of creative writing, a world I haven't touched publicly before this past year.

More immediately the words have been called forth by a new location, the adventures that come with moving to a new city, landscape, people, and activities. In the middle of August I moved to Pittsburgh to start studying for a PhD in English. Classes have begun, the work is piling up, but I refuse to quench the adventurous spirit that's been tapping my shoulder from within and saying, "come on let's go!"
My latest excursion was just this afternoon. I drove across the Monogahela River (possibly not the correct spelling) and visited the Pump House, the last remaining original structure of the Homestead steel mill. Grandpa Stanford was in steel, so was Uncle Richard, and I've been wanting to learn about that part of their lives, my heritage. I sat in the old brick structure listening to two Pittsburgh authors reading both poetry and fiction about workers and a time long gone. Beyond the speakers I looked through tall arched windows, seeing light falling on red steel beams, hand-mortered brick walls, lockers supporting an orange hard hat, tools mounted on the wall forming shapes like letters--a working man's graffiti. The poet sported graying hair and informal flannel. He spoke of days as a laborer, a carpenter. The novelist was a small weathered man with a soft voice; the mind he speaks out of searches the dark corneres of hard labor issues, of much strife. It struck me that I sat in a room symbolic of steel labor, surrounded by people whose lives did and still do directly intersect with that industry, that dark, heat-filled, dangerous industry.
Afterwards I wandered around the grounds, read the plaques, pondered the people who fought for their wages and died on that spot back in 1892. The image that drew my attention the most strongly was the sight of #s 6 and 7 across the river, the last two Rankin Steel Furnaces that remain standing. They rise like monsters above the trees. It's impossible to ignore them, their darkness and their enormity kept me from looking away. I wonder how the shape, the smell, the feel, the personality of Pittsburgh would be different if those sharp black smoke stacks had never pierced the skies along the Monongahela.

I was born in this city but not raised here. Somehow it's a part of me. While I live here I'd like to discover how, and in the process I want to learn the city of bridges and steel, to know its streets, its colors, its people. The adventure has begun.