Sometimes a day feels less like time and more like a bag of feelings strung together by people and locations.
Travel provides a unique opportunity to be outside of our routines. While I long to see new places when I leave my security behind I long for the comforts of familiarity. It's uncomfortable out there. Away from my privacy. Away from my creative spaces. Sometimes I would like to dip a toe and then leap back, back to my cosy space where I can think, and feel, and feel safe and unchallenged.
The opportunity to look inwards and take stock, while looking
outwards at a new place. Being away allows us with the freedom and somewhat forces me to be with people
who may seem very different from us, and the time to begin to know them in ways
that are often much more meaningful than the experiences we have with acquaintances at home. The term
'Quality Time' comes to mind.
Of the many months, spaces and places that I have spent traveling the world it is the moments when I have made deep connections with others and within myself that are burned into my psyche.
The time when I sat with two cyclists in Wat Suan Mokkh in
Thailand.
The magical and harrowing ten days that I spent alone in Sapa
in the north of Vietnam.
The month I spent trekking up and down the Himalayas with my
luminous mamma, enthralled as she whiled away the hours with stories of
northern Africa and Europe in the seventies.
The day I spent singing in my car driving through the hills
in northern New South Wales with three travelers sharing the joy of a sparkling
souled two year old.
All 'those people' on the other side of the world,'the other', those are people that I care about.
Then, a beautiful woman shared this with the world... sometimes I wonder if we are living parallel lives:
When something upsetting happens, it is tempting and easy to
say,
''That has nothing to do with me. What is wrong with the
people over there?''
The pointing the finger response is divisive and can only
create more anger and misunderstanding.
We are all part of this world and we all contribute to it's
beauty and horrors.
The question isn't, ''What is wrong with them?'', it is
''What is wrong with us?''.
Then a friend wrote me an email entitled:
"Kristy! Why do you live so far away!"
Rather than simply being flattered I became philosophical.
Maybe one reason why we live so far away from wonderful people is as a constant
reminder not to fear the other. Those people are my people. It's harder to
hate, ridicule or dismiss when you know what and who you are hating, ridiculing or
dismissing. It's the exceptions that I am looking for. The people and the experiences that make me question the assumptions, the stereotypes, and the distancing.
Robert Frost famously wrote about boundaries:
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Robert Frost famously wrote about boundaries:
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
I spent the
weekend with some friends who live in far away lands. Lands that I am yet to
visit. We spoke about everything imaginable. I learned many new things about
myself and about the way we live here. I realised again the cultural relativity
of the way we experience the world we live in.
