She bounded into the room with expectation and energy as though she had just come from another part of our city, the seventeen year old did, and not as though she was one week into a year long exchange program from a country literally half way around the world. She and her fellow adventurers around the table shared with us mentors their fierceness and passion for freedom, travel, wisdom, vision. Seventeen?

Weighing this now, I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure that I must have been a total idiot until ... well until just recently. And I may still be fooling myself. Looking back on beliefs and experiences in my childhood and adolescence that both shaped me and "shook my world" I see um, eh, things like the shock I felt when I first saw a woman driving a car with a perfectly able, licensed male passenger. Oh, my. She must be dominatrix. He must not be quite right. And, the only way to outsmart harm and/or death was to never venture beyond - beyond whatever was the prescribed boundary of the known, proven, and accepted.

This experience is good for me, as it would be for everyone. I find myself nearly as shaken by these youths around the table, so far from home, trusting the goodness of people in the USA as I was by that progressive female driver. But, now, I celebrate the shake up.