turns out

we are only human after all

A new year, a new intention

2011 came and went. Just as it was meant to. I looked back today at where my 2011 began. I breathe and it feels like I have lived a few lives since then, I breathe and it feels like yesterday. Not a single month without travel. Each lunch and brunch and sleep over documented. It looked like this:

Missouri Arkansas Louisiana Texas New Mexico Arizona California Washington Oklahoma Missouri New York Connecticut Rhode Island Massachusetts Missouri Tanzania Michigan Illinois Missouri New York Massachusetts Rhode Island Missouri Illinois Missouri Oregon Missouri Utah Missouri New York Massachusetts Washington DC Missouri Texas.

It’s almost exhausting, but it was a kick ass year. January 1^st 2011, Recently back from Tanzania, I drank in the New Year with family. The ones who I honor the most. The days came, and the year brought many things. Marriage, death, birth, engagement, dismayed, betrayal, hope, honor, discouragement, perseverance, perspective, denial, truth, pain, joy, contentment, turmoil, triumph. I reflect on the small moments and the grand gestures but most of all, among these, the stillness and the words that formed the shifting that occurred. The shift within me that no one else sees. The shift in intention and mentality and approach to humanity, and to love. It’s beginning. I fuck it up all the time, like today. But I notice now. And I am shifting my intent and my focus and how I show up for the world, and how I show up for me. I hope one day this will transform me, that one day I will really embody love in a new way, that loves well. I may be old and gray before its recognizable, but it will be my life’s journey. I will love with purpose and trust and connection and support and boldness and freedom and joy.  It's 2012 and I endeavor to be someone new this year, someone new for me and someone new for you. Here’s to loving, to failing, and to loving again.

For now.

I am within myself. Full of me.  Embodying who I am. I am in my mind, in my heart, in my body, in my step, in my vision, in my voice. I perceive me as me, as I am, not as I am perceived. I am the me I create, the creation I am. 

Acceptance and those we forget exist.

"I don't know much, I don't know where I am going or where I will end up. But, I know I have this cigarette and I know I have right now." 

-Quail (Wanderer, Austin Texas)

Dog Shit park, its a patch of grass. It might as well be home. We sit in a circle, taking long pulls from the whiskey bottle. Pull and pass. There are six others, that makes seven. Ellie sits to my left, rolling her dreadlocks between her thumb and forefinger. Quail lies in the grass beside her, propped up on his knapsack, taking long drags on his cigarette. He was raised traveling as a child and hasn't had a home for 13 years. After the whiskey bottle passes, a can of beer, Natural Light. 

Someone made extra today with a borrowed guitar, singing the blues on the corner of Guadalupe and 25th. I met them earlier in the day sitting on the corner. I knew no one in this town. I bought Ellie a beer, her in a black trench coat and overalls, me with moccasins and a sweater drinking Highlife together behind a parked car. Some things are simple. She brought me to the group and we joined in, singing like dinner depended on it. A nice man with grey hair bought us a pizza and beers wrapped in brown paper bags. We sat in the alley behind Urban Outfitters sharing the slices, sipping from cans, and laughing about traveling stories as we pull our jackets tight against the wind. Some have been out here for years. One young boy says he left home two weeks ago, he can’t be older than 16 and he passes out before I learn any more. No one speaks of the past.

Hours later, the group is quiet, an honest kind of quiet. I pull my hat low and wrap my jacket tight. Shay is round and kind with a big red beard and has a genuine joy about life. He is wearing coveralls and carries his guitar and a large canteen filled with beer. The girl to my right introduces herself as McKenzie, and she smiles through the night, her boyfriend never says a word. She is the only one with a job, walking dogs in the morning. She laughs as she packs her pipe with weed. "I found this here in the grass last week," she is thrilled. 

I remember the morning I moved into my college house years ago and found a pipe in my closet left by the tenants before. I thought it was dirty then, but now, I too pull and pass. No one cares why I am here. I look different, and they know I have a home somewhere. But tonight I am one of them any way. 

Jake has blond hair to his shoulders, a soft voice and kind eyes. He reminds me of a rugged, homeless Jesus. He tells stories of tripping acid and surfing the biggest waves you can imagine. Everyone gets fucked up as they make plans to hop a freight train in the morning. Quail has come from Eugene, Ellie from Baltimore, Jake from San Francisco others from New York, San Diego, Tampa, but that's not where they are going. 

"Home isn't a place anymore" says Ellie. It's past midnight now and the two of us walk together back to the streets. She has been gone for a long time now. "I wander, and I beg, I hitchhike, and I sleep in places people think I shouldn't. Society judges me, and I judge society. It's all the same in the end. Who’s to say what is right. I certainly can't." I find her incredible, and brave, and rare. We sit along the wall under florescent lights. "We might be able to score some drunk change" she says, and starts asking people as they walk by heading out of the bar to their cars and their warm homes. "Do you have a little change to spare?" she asks again and again with a gentleness I admire. Most people push past without a glance.  I wonder if I would have done the same. I feel embarrassed and then honored, apologetic and then strong. We make two quarters, one dime, and three pennies that a young woman throws down with disgust. To the world, in that moment, we hardly exist.

It wouldn’t be until weeks later that I realize the type of acceptance I experienced that night on the streets of Austin, in the smoke at Dog Shit Park, under the bridge with the makeshift tents. I learned to accept from those that I previously deemed to barely exist. 

pain is an invitation to grow.

Create

110 degrees.
Thats some bull shit Missouri.

it's just different

Different is not bad.
Different is not wrong.

career path

Someone asked me the other day what my career path will be.

I wonder, out loud now, why this cannot be my path,

the one I am on now.

I wonder what a career path is, where the path begins and ends.

Does it begin with money and end with success or can we dare to say, happiness?

Or maybe that is just every ones greatest desire.

And let's not even get started on happiness and the way we all wait for it to come. 

Waiting.

patiently or anxiously

for the moments we believe must be out there, away from the stress of the world.

waiting waiting waiting for happy

instead of choosing it everyday ourselves.

maybe our career path in its perfect state can one day lead to happy

or what if happy led to the career path instead.

and it wasn't specific,

as I find my happiness rarely is.

And career path becomes a path indeed, a long winding journey through valleys and hills and mountain tops.

And maybe my career path is just that. 

Finding something I believe in, where happiness and life abide, and committing myself to working for the cause.

Following the journey wherever it may lead.

In any capacity

While its not the career path you asked about, or the answer you expected, it is my path indeed.

thought.

I wonder if people can actually change.

May 20th

If you live in Tanzania, this might be what your birthday looks like! Greatest birthday ever. 

rain

Its raining.
the water comes in sheets
washing away the road
as we pass sliding through the mud
from one side to the other
the crops are drinking now
they have browned without water
with the drought that was anticipated
but its raining now.
the old man in the car next to me turns and says
"God has not forgotten us. He remembers those who remember Him"
Some thought God had forgotten.
He had forgotten them here buried in the hills of the vast land in Tanzania
in the small mud homes where they crouch together
in the dust
But God remembers.

My Birthday Wish!

Dear Family, Friends, Community and Blog readers-


My birthday is coming up on May 20th, It has been an incredible year of life and this year I will be in Tanzania as I celebrate. Though I am many miles away, I asking you to join me in the celebration by supporting some of my favorite people in the world... the students of Orkeeswa Secondary School! 


It is my Birthday Wish to raise $500 to support Orkeeswa students. 
Please check out my cause here where you can donate and share the link with family and friends. It is easy, secure and tax-deductible:


Quinn's Birthday Wish


Celebrate with me by empowering todays youth with a voice of their own and opportunities through the gift of education. 


with gratitude, light and love,


Quinn Brady

Quinn and Judith

Writing a story

In life,
If, we only see what we are looking for-
And, it is possible for us to be a part of writing our own story-

And in my life, I cant find the ability to trust-
Then, maybe all I am looking for (concentrating on, aware of, expecting),
is the possibility of being let down, deceived, left, unwanted, forsaken.

If, this is what I am looking for-
Then, it is all i am finding-
and it becomes the story that I write for myself.

And

I want to write a different story.
I Will write a different story.

cake

In the porcelain tub the water runs hot and long. I lather my hair with soaps smelling of flowers, and then I wash it again because I can. Using the blade against my legs as the water runs down the drain. 30 hours later I am under running water that drizzles lightly from the faucet and is cold with a lack of power. A spider scurries up the wall beside me. I am thirsty, and put water on the stove to boil for 20 minutes in order to have something drinkable. I lie on the bed and soak in the moments. In many moments I feel like I never left this place. And in the periphery of some of those very same moments I feel like the foreign, the challenge, is all I see. I am struck by the differences, the lack of American understanding. The immense challenge that we the people face to even touch the fringes of understanding and then begin to move that understanding to advocacy, action and change. I lay remembering the feathertop mattress in my room and the doctor’s appointment I so easily attained at home. I don’t think one way of life or the other is wrong, I don’t disagree or think a culture should be downplayed, discarded, or deemed wrong.  But I do think that something greater exits, that being a part of the bigger story is possible for all of us.

Driving through the village, everything is green. When I left 3 months ago dust kicked into the air under the feet of every passerby. Brown covered the land. The water was cherished by the drop. Sickness spread and people wandered miles to haul a Jerican of water back home. Now the water overflows washing away roads, filling damns and lighting up the land with color and life. Water means growth and crops and survival. It also means typhoid and mosquitoes which mean malaria. It seems the challenges never end.

I spend an hour in the land rover learning to drive a stick shift. I wish I would have learned years ago. Instead I am learning here, driving on the other side of the road, through mud shin deep among the goats and children running through the village. After killing the engine several times on the hill, Michael looks at me and laughs  “QB, this is easy like eating cake with juice!” The kids laugh at me in the back seat, teasing me every step of the way. We celebrate as I conquer the hill. The laughter and ease settles me and I drive along navigating the muddy roads pretending I am eating cake. Hours later I am sitting in the hospital waiting room with students, one is going deaf, another is having anxiety attacks as a result of home life, one is suffering from typhoid and another has possible appendicitis, hunched over for hours in pain. It doesn’t feel like eating cake.

I think maybe it’s about laughing and celebrating and eating cake with your friends in the moments we are given, and standing together navigating the cake-less moments as they come. 

Back to Tanzania!

In a few short weeks I will be back in Monduli, Tanzania with 100 of my favorite people in the world and I couldn't be more excited. 

The Indigenous Education Foundation of Tanzania (IEFT) is a community-collaborative organization, providing quality, affordable education to under-served children in rural Tanzania, East Africa. Through the organization’s collaborative model involving both village government and tribal leadership, IEFT staff members work alongside community members in the implementation of the organization’s projects. Straying from the common “aid giving” model, IEFT believes in empowering community members by providing youth with the knowledge and skills to create positive change within their own communities. Education is the key in breaking the cycle of extreme poverty.

I would love to hear from you!

If you would like to get involved or know more about how you can help with educating Maasai youth in Tanzania, contact me at quinnlbrady@gmail.com. 

To find out more about IEFT and Orkeeswa Secondary School, visit http://www.ieftz.org/.

New York and the Future

I spent a wonderful week on the east coast with some fabulous people, having conversations about our families, about our dreams, about how to fight poverty, promote education, train medical workers, and teach public health to communities in need. A million miles removed, sitting around a table with brilliant women, surrounded by buzzing taxis, skyscrapers, and wine we talked about the people we have come to love in Tanzania. We talked about our commitment to one another, our commitment to the people in our own communities and abroad, and about our commitment to be change agents in the world.  We shared our desire to be a part of the global community and the conversations that are taking place among humanity. As we talked about our strengths and our weaknesses, we talked about our skills and solutions, what we have to give and what we have to learn. And as we departed days later in our own separate ways, some of us heading back to Tanzania this month, others in the next year, we walked away together.  We walked away empowered, with a renewed passion and dedication to open our hands and our hearts to the world, and love big, with all the love we have.

UNITE team and friends

We hope you join the conversation and the adventure with us. 

http://www.unitetnz.org/

A little news...

Here is a little story from the Washington Missourian sharing what has been going on with IEFT and UNITE in Tanzania!

Check it out Here at the Washington Missourian Online.