I'm back from Brazil.

The quiet is so loud.

I think, sitting here, I'm fighting depression.
Sometimes this happens after a big event.

I've been trying to keep busy, and distracted... but I can only get my room so clean, my car insurance so taken care of, and my tax return filed so many times.... So here I sit.

It was beautiful, and disappointing, and amazing and big, and good and less than and more than...

I came away with so much that a part of me is scared I didn't give enough.


While in a sub-poverty "neighborhood" (seemed more like a pile of shacks) we saw a mass of children with less than nothing... and as they wrestled with me and climbed on my back they smiled at me.

Their smiles burned me.

The good kind of burn, like walking in the sun on a warm day after a white-out. The kind that you feel on the inside as well as the out, the kind that makes you glad to be alive.

And a bad kind of burn. A burn of shame for everytime I whined for a stupid reason, for everytime I was selfish, for every single thing I have that I haven't been thankful for.

We gave these kids candy, and you'd think they found the whole world in a foil wrapper.

I gave some kids attention, and they spent an hour trying to make me proud. Performing amazing acrobatic feats including barefooted backflips off of jagged cinderblock walls. And while feeling my own pride being burned away... I was proud.

So proud.

I was proud to be standing amidst these beautiful, amazing children who'd been handed a short end of a worthless stick, but in defiance of the death, hunger and poverty around them they had this blinding spark of life within them.

I left those children, taking away so much more than I'd brought. I left with inspiration.

I left with further confirmation that people really are beautiful.

What do I have to be depressed about?

Nothing.

My God, I want to be a benefit to this world.