Inspiration...

Here are a few hints as to the inspiration and the reasoning as to why I joined the Peace Corps in the first place and why I want to go to Africa.
I can't help but feel that a great deal many poets write in order to give advice to their younger selves on what life is really like. This is probably the reason so much poetry includes the themes of running off to do something crazy rather than sit safely at home and live life doing the bare minimum. Africa is going to be a crash course in finding out what this thing we call life is really about.

On a Tree Fallen Across the Road
(To Hear Us Talk)

by Robert Frost

The tree the tempest with a crash of wood
Throws down in front of us is not to bar
Our passage to our journey's end for good,
But just to ask us who we think we are

Insisting always on our own way so.
She likes to halt us in our runner tracks,
And make us get down in a foot of snow
Debating what to do without an axe.

And yet she knows obstruction is in vain:
We will not be put off the final goal
We have it hidden in us to attain,
Not though we have to seize earth by the pole

And, tired of aimless circling in one place,
Steer straight off after something into space.

and another - I don't want this post to get too long and bore people with a lot of poetry, but I like this poem so much I have to put the whole thing up. It gets to the point and conveys the message pretty quickly:

A Ritual to Read to Each Other

by William Stafford

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give-- yes or no, maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.