Today, Dream Of A City is a year old.

Today also, most coincidentally, my journeying is done, for now.  We’ve moved in to the new place. The bed and couch are in.  The plants and garden table are on the balcony.  And most importantly, Kitty has been released from quarantine.

While most of my stuff is still being shipped from New York, as far as I see it, I’ve set up home here in Singapore.  And so it’s the end of an era.

When I started this blog, I was going through the most uncertain phase in my life, to say the least. I wasn’t sure where I would be – and it took lots of travel (and therapy) to finally figure out the question I needed to ask wasn’t “where I ought to be.”

Rather, it was more to do with “who I am,” independent of my job and namecard, of my family and friends, of my beloved – and what it was I wanted out of life.  I needed to discover what it was that “I” meant.

I suppose it wouldn’t be far from the truth to say that Dream Of A City was above all a journey within – a means for me to make sense of everything that was happening to and around me, and which I felt were almost always completely out of my control.  And it took a lot for me to understand that that’s ok – that you can’t really control everything; that the most you can really do is try to understand and go with the flow; that perfect is unattainable and close-to-perfect is more than good enough.

Oy vey!

While physically at least, I’m likely to be based in one place from now on, I’m not, by any means, stopping what it is that I do – which is to travel, observe, record, contemplate photograph, understand and write.  And so the second year of Dream Of A City will most likely continue very much in the same vein as the first year.

Because that – the travel, observation, recording, contemplation, photographing, understanding and writing – is what, I’ve discovered “I” mean, in a nutshell. And it doesn’t matter that whatever I create here never gets (published) anywhere else.  Because ultimately I’m doing this because I want to; and because if I didn’t do it, I think I would probably die.

That I think, is the outcome of this first year of dreaming and cities – the recognition that this wanton dreaming of and being in cities is indeed something I could see myself doing for the rest of my life, irregardless of where that might lead.

And I think I have been very fortunate indeed to able to reach that conclusion, and to find myself able to actually see that conclusion through.

Aiyah, here I am thinking too much again.  I should just celebrate the first anniversary of my blog, and leave it at that.

Here’s to being Home!