Hello, this is my blog.

This was originally going to be the "Hi, this is my blog" text in the side bar, and then it got giant, so bear with me. I suppose you could call this the first post in my blog - and fear not, gentle reader, for most of my posts here will not be half so philosophical, nor nearly so lengthy. I know I tend to carry on.

This blog will track my day-to-day life as I travel from Ontario, Canada to live and work in Japan as an ESL teacher. I had a hard time trying to choose the title of this blog, as it seems so often that people choose a defining aspect of their character or personality to be the theme, as it were, for their blogging, and I wasn't quite ready to box myself in to a fixed identity yet. I toyed with ideas surrounding "teacher", "gluten-free", "poetry", "Canadian", "feminist", all of which are defining aspects of my identity but which, I feel, whittle me down to being defined by just that aspect alone.

As a graduate of a combined women's studies and English program, I put a lot of stock by words: which ones we choose to say and how to say them, because they define us, whether we know it or not.

The title "Wind-Swept Spirit" comes from a quote by Matsuo Basho (the famous Japanese haiku poet) on what drove him to write poetry; I found it apt, as it originates from the introduction to one of his travel journals. You can find the quote in full here. It suggests a certain rootlessness of, almost a vagabondage if not for the one thread - the wind-swept spirit - that ties his being together; it is his poetic soul, driving him restlessly from one place in life to the next.

I rather like that.