31 1 / 2013
“Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.” - Henry David Thoreau
30 1 / 2013
undr:
Fifth Avenue at 25th Street, 1905
even hidden by fog and time, the flatiron is straight up delicious.
30 1 / 2013
“When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” – William Least Heat-Moon
I don’t dream frequently like others do.
I lie down, and I sleep. It’s a skill that has served me well in my travels.
But lately, I have been dreaming a lot more than usual. And when I wake, I recall dreams about far away lands, places I’ve never been to before, and people I’ve never met.
It’s been so long since my big trip in 2010. My feet are itching to take off on my next adventure.
19 12 / 2012
Dubrovnik, Croatia. Only spent a week here, but what a glorious week it was. Would jump at the chance to go back again, and go exploring beyond the coast.
19 12 / 2012
Asolo, Italy. What a pleasure it was to get an insight into small town life in rural Italy. I still have great memories of cobblestone streets, vines growing along medieval buildings, drinking locally-brewed beer, and enjoying the entertainment provided by the wandering choir…led by the town mayor!
04 12 / 2012
Loving going through old photos, especially of The City. Can’t wait to get back…hopefully at the end of 2013! :)
04 12 / 2012
Photo collages are one of my favourite ways to reminisce. Can’t believe I’ve been home for two years.
18 11 / 2012
It feels like I’ve been home forever. Which is fairly ridiculous, given that over the past four months my “home” has been stacked up and drifted two thousand miles west like a continent. But the thing is, a mega grocery mart in California is a mega grocery mart in Minnesota. Traffic and English and ease and the relatively familiar are the same here as they are there as they would be anywhere in these 50 states, more or less. By which I mean that my feet remain restless, my heart is ready for something truly different.
When my father turned 60 this spring, I said: Let’s do something big. And, where in the world do you want to go? Northern India, he said and so I’ll fly to meet him and my brother in Delhi and seven or eight days later, just about the time we have moved through Rajasthan and also from delighting in each other to murdering each other, C. will join us as a very welcomed distraction for the next two weeks north by northeast. And maybe a little south? It’s hard to say. There are few plans and four sets of vibrant, detailed day dreams and I cannot wait to see where the compromises will take us.
So in a few days, I’ll zip up my backpack and do that bend and swing - that favorite hoisting up and over, after which everything you need (more than you need, really) is carried on your back. Under your own steam power. And there are no laptops or telephones, little vanity and few tethers home.
It’s hard not to grin while I write this and so I’ve stopped trying. I never feel completely at home here, you know? I think these feet were legitimately built to wander. It’s been 18 months since the last big trip to Colombia and that probably doesn’t seem like very long, but it’s a bit like holding my breath. Out there - anywhere - is the big exhale. Better, even, the big inhale. Out there, I feel my best self rise back up. Calm back down. I find myself again and my place - in a far backseat to the other 6,999,999,999 people in the world and what they’ve carried and what their parents carried and the thousands of glorious years of battles and faith and ruin and heritage and culinary ingenuity and victory and pilgrimage and uprising that nip me down to only this: Insignificance and Blessing.
How lucky we are that the world is this big, that we might never reach it all.
I can hardly sleep at night thinking of the colors and the pace, the spice and the noise, learning the melody of a city I don’t understand. Watching a thousand miles of your countryside roll by like ribbons, like filmstrips. Catch me up, I’ll yell! Just praying the world will comply, just waiting to be overwhelmed. And I’ll memorize everything I can so that one day, when we are very much back home. Weighed down by the glories and the weariness of this domestic life, I can pull that packet out and wrap myself in its colors like peace.
18 11 / 2012
"If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardour and paradoxes - than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside the constraints of work and the struggle for survival."
18 11 / 2012
“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
~Terry Pratchett from A Hat Full of Sky.
Photo by Sioen Roux. (Taken with instagram)
though i rarely update this blog these days, i can tell you that the desire to travel still burns brightly within. but i am struggling with an enviable dilemma - i am so content here, but the wide world beckons…
(via beenthinking)
