I should be sleeping. It's 12:43 am and my husband has pulled the pillow over his head in disgust at the lights and the key stroke sounds disturbing his beauty sleep. I'm up tonight working on the framework for a Google site that I'm creating for my PhD program. I have lots of blank space to fill, no doubt, but I want to start the process now and not wait. The blank space is intimidating and makes me feel so green and so new at all of this. It's a clean slate to a new building that I will build through this process. I'm tempted to fill it with 20+ year old papers to make it look like something it's not. But that is so not the point of this. So I face the blank pages, and face the fact that I am beginning again.

Although the Google site is a convenient excuse I have a head full of questions that are keeping me awake. Something that I've wanted for so long is now at my grasp, pursuit of a PhD. I'm nervous, wondering if I have what it takes to really do as well as I would like. I want to do so much. I dream of it all the time. I want to travel, meet scholars from other countries. I want to publish, search for new ways to tackle some of the issues and research interests that I have. But first, I have to go to class, do lots of reading, reasoning, writing, and research for my core classes. I can see the big picture so clearly right now. The vision keeps my head in the clouds and my feet moving forward. Running forward. I'm so eager to get started. I know that once I get started, I'll know more than I know now and I have so many questions, ideas, plans, hopes, dreams. But I need to go to class first.

I wonder if my initial theories regarding natural networks among low-income women will hold up. Very little research has been done on the issue. That can either be a good sign or a bad one. I'm interested to follow the natural systems as they've developed for centuries among impoverished women of various cultures and to learn how they affect the ways in which marginalized women use those systems to negotiate resources that come from outside of those systems. I want to look at communities and the ways it can grow entrepreneurship through natural systems. Can that even exist anymore? Has the "integration" of working and financially stable families dismantled this phenomenon as part of a community dynamic? People were once driven together by circumstances  beyond their control. Now with more choices, those circumstances affect economically unstable populations in ways that are not fully understood, I think. I have some summer reading to do to explore this idea further. Here is my list so far for the summer:

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
Planning Chicago by D. Bradford Hunt and Jon DeVries
Off the Books by Sudhir Venkatesh

Each of these books will offer a different perspective on this issue, I hope. I need to remember to do some idea mapping as I read to follow how I see the narratives in each and their relationship to the one I would like to build. I need to seek out more books that deal with early emancipation communities in the south and to study the Rosewoods of the south, self-sustaining communities and their challenges, strengths. I want to read these first for a more broad perspective before diving into distinct communities for more refined study and understanding.

This is my first blog post. The first time I've shared what often goes into a private journal. The first time feels, vulnerable, exciting, scattered in thought, and also relieving. Nothing compares to this for me, and is part of my goal to stretch myself beyond my comfort zone. This journey is about that, indeed. It seems the more I push myself and my limits to my potential, the more comfortable I feel in my own skin. Fears are abated and I conquer emotional mountains that remind me that pushing them aside is always best.

Time to turn out the lights and get some sleep for the next 5 hours if I'm lucky. Goodnight.