This is it!

Allow me to end on something of a sentimental note?

I love my life. And the more amazing it gets, the more I realize that I have done nothing to deserve the kinds of opportunities that I have had. To be able to travel to Europe doing the thing that I love most in this world? To have met the people I have? To have been a part of so many amazing projects? My only explanation is: God is good all the time. All the time God is good!

And who knows? This exciting season of my life may be over tomorrow. But for now, all I see are reasons to be humbled by it, to be thankful for it. So many reasons to remember that God has a plan for me far beyond what I have tried (and failed) to plan for myself.

Thank you, Dear Readers, for following along in this latest adventure. Having people read my first attempt at something like this was very flattering. Blogging, I have learned, is rewarding, but very frustrating.

Frustrating because as the trip went on it became harder and harder to feel like I was adequately describing anything.

A few photos and paragraphs could never really explain what it felt like to sit on the steps of the abbey with a glass of wine after a long day of classes.

And I never even wrote about our eccentric Icelandic musical director, Haldor, who stood up in a small French restaurant after he had been asked to be quiet and shouted in response, "IS THIS A LIBRARY?!"

And I never described what it was like to stand in a dark room with our graceful pianist, Yuko, and sing, 'I Dreamed a Dream' all by myself while she played the entire song from memory.

Or how Andrea's beautiful Italian accent would make us laugh when he said our lines back to us during rehearsals.

Or how dirty our feet ALWAYS were.

Or what it meant to hear Andrzej & Teresa tell the class, "Wherever you go, we support you. We are with you."

And the impromptu midnight opera concerts sang off of a cell phone screen.

And the children's song we sang with Andrew after our parade that left many in tears:
Who knows when we'll be all together again? So for now we'll say, 'We're here. We're here!'

And the rewarding agony that was rehearsing and creating and then finally performing our crazy, beautiful show.

I guess I had to come to terms with the fact that no blog would be able to do this experience justice. And so I settled for anecdotes, for some sort of brief, digestible narrative. I hope I was able to provide at least a glimpse, because life is just too big for the confines of a stupid blog.

C'est la vie.

-Shannon