Of Grasshoppers and Geography

Big surprise: The other day, I was listening to MPR.

MPR is the Minnesota version of NPR, and I am an ardent fan.

I was on my way to the gym when I caught part of a re-broadcast lecture by Barbara Brown Taylor. She was speaking about how to encounter the divine in your daily life.

She was promoting her new book, An Altar in the Word: A Geography of Faith.

The "geography of faith" part of the title grabbed my attention. The words reminded me of another book, The Geography of Bliss, that I read last year. That book made my Top 5 Reads of 2008.

But her subject matter also pulled me in. Taylor introduced the idea of "the sacred art of stopping." This, art, she said, is the ability to stop, be still, notice the details of your surroundings, and in doing so, acknowledge the creator.

This echoed exactly a book I'm currently reading called Haiku Mind. In fact, I had been struggling to write a review of Haiku Mind for my haiku blog before I'd ditched it in exchange for my trip to the gym which put me in my car listening to Taylor.

So, after introducing "the sacred art of stopping", Taylor then read a poem by Mary Oliver.

The poem's last line is widely quoted. It's everywhere from retirement cards to graduation speeches to inspirational calendars. "Tell me," it goes, "what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

While I had heard this line thousands of times, I don't know that I've ever heard the poem it concludes in its entirety.

Here it is:

The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

The Jolt of the City

I am in need of a Spring Break. So many people these days are getting away to the beach. I, however, am yearning for the "jolt" of a big city.

Here's the haiku I posted the other day on my haiku blog, Haiku By Two:

I need Manhattan,
Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Rome,
out of these suburbs.

Photo - Bangkok

On Travel Friends and Travel

So I've made it to New York.

Not the city. The state. I'm here for five or so days, somewhere in suburbia.

It used to be that I traveled to the city once a year (sometimes twice) to hang with my good friends, travel buds, gals I picked up on the road who called Brooklyn and Manhattan home.

Now though, both are married, both are moms and both have left the urban congestion behind for the equally-maddening suburban kind.

It's a strange and glorious thing to visit travel buds on their home turf. It's perhaps even more of a strange and glorious thing to go into their now-established homes and eat meals with their husbands and kids.

Here are these women, my friends that I met while we were all off doing wild, adventurous things, and now they are (and I am too I suppose) settled and busy being adults, as opposed to busy becoming adults, which was what we were doing at the time of our meetings.

I was busy becoming an adult when I met Alison in Argentina.

And then Alison and I met Michelle in Peru.

And then Michelle and I traveled together through Guatemala.


And so it was that a series of Latin American jaunts brought these women, women I truly consider two of my soul mates, into my life.

What is it about people that you meet on the road? Since becoming a traveler, I've always marveled at how quickly bonds are formed on the move.

On this trip, I happened to ask Michelle what she thought it was that brought random travelers together.

"Vulnerability," she said. "It makes you hang on to people you don't know."

Lucky for me, I've been able to hang onto these friends longer than the trips on which I met them. It's been 10 (gulp) years now since I met them both.

Photos:

2008 - Celebrating our 10 year-reunion with calorie-packed, gourmet cookies in suburban New York.

1998 - Triumphant and tired after hiking four days to reach Machu Picchu. We really could have used those cookies way back then.

The Secret Travel Lives of Others

Cyclone. Earthquake. Cancer. Alzheimer's.

All of these words have entered my ears and left my lips in the past two weeks, and each has left a mark. I haven't felt much like blogging.

While the natural disasters in Asia seem to run on a constantly spinning newsreel online, on TV and on NPR, it is my own personal local concerns that have consumed my recent thoughts.

For example, there is a man I know. His name is Art.

He is an older man with a crop of white hair, a man from around the neighborhood,and although he doesn't know it, he has helped me a great deal.

Four years ago I moved from the city to the suburbs and it was a hard transition for me; I loved my old neighborhood so. I had called that house in the city my home for over eight years and I was fairly convinced that my new home, my suburban home, would offer me little character, connection or charm.

But Art became my character, my connection and my charm. He hangs out at a nearby coffee shop. He arrives every afternoon at 4:30, reads a book, stays for an hour then goes.

But he'll gladly give up his book to talk to me. Regulars tend to recognize each other, whether they are of the coffee tab, pull tab or bar tab sort. After we made our initial acquaintance, Art always remembered to ask me about my writing.

He spots my byline about town and wants to know when I'm going to publish a book. He's so diligent in his questions about my writing career that sometimes I think he's my biggest fan.

After meeting him at the coffee shop, I started seeing him everywhere -- the grocery store, the Chinese place -- and he helped me feel that maybe the suburbs weren't all formulamatic, that maybe this new neck of the woods could be my home.

I knew that Art had struggled with cancer. Yet I also knew he'd beaten it. But now it's back and Art told me the other day, "I've run out of miracles."

"You don't know that," I countered.

"Yes, I do. I've had more than my fair share," he replied.

"So impress me," I prodded. "Tell me about your miracles."

"Well, back when I lived in Lybia," he started and proceeded to spin a tale from decades past. Then he moved on to stories of the Dominican Republic, stories that weren't all palm trees and umbrella cocktails.

I'd had no idea that Art had such a wildly traveled past and it made me start to wonder about the others around me. Who else in that coffee shop had had a miraculous travel experience and was just sitting on it, keeping it quiet?

And then, a dear family friend passed away. She was a woman who'd always been in my life, a woman who'd driven me to junior high choir practice and pulled me water skiing behind her speed boat.

She was a woman who barely sat still, but who in the past handful of years had been bogged down by a myriad of health problems, including Alzheimer's. This was particular tragic as she was just in her sixties. She died the other night at age 66.

But back before Jan learned about her Alzheimer's, she was an avid traveler, a loyal and ardent lover of the human race. She was a woman who took so many trips that her children followed her footsteps and became travelers, too. In fact, her son helped coach my hubby and me through the planning stages of our own global roam.

And yet, throughout these past few years, she was forced to give up that passion in exchange for care centers and care takers, who -- I'm quite certain -- were clueless to her travel past.

All this has convinced me, a traveler who has the wanderlust bad, that us travelers need to be more vocal and diligent about sharing our travel tales before we forget them and before we take them to the grave.

The person on the receiving end might be more receptive than you expected and you just might spark a whole new breed of wanderlust.

If you've made it this far in this travel musing and want an outlet for releasing your hibernating travel tale, check out this page on my newly launched travel site, a site which I have designed with the goal of sparking wanderlust in a new generation.

Photos:
Cemetery angle in Havana, Cuba
Dragonflies in Burma
Candles burning in Montreal's Notre Dame

Of Confessionals and Travel

I like poetry, but it's not often that I sit down with a book of poems. The act of reading poetry seems to require more stillness, more quietness of the mind then I have on hand these days.

Yet I was recently wandering the stacks of a local bookstore and found myself standing before a shelf of poetry. Hmmm, I thought, poetry.

My eyes were drawn to a slim book with a red cover. No surprise. I like red. Turns out, it was a new book of poems penned by a poet who's name I actually recognized: Grace Paley.

I flipped through the pages and stopped on one. The title drew me in. It was: "I Met A Woman On A Plane."

I read it through, then I read it again. It reminded me of all the random conversations I've had with people I've met on a plane, those stories belonging to others that I just can't shake even though the teller's name is a mystery. Indeed, the teller's face soon fades. But their stories remain.

What is it about an airplane that makes total strangers reveal intimate parts of themselves to others?

The annonymity of it all, I suppose. It's a bit like a confessional. A chance to spill your beans, to say what no one in your daily life wants to hear, and then the chance to walk away from the moment, from the secret-spilling, without any guilt, judgment or blame.

Here is the poem:

I Met A Woman On A Plane

she came from somewhere around Tampa
she was going to Chicago
I liked her a lot
she'd had five children
no she'd had six, one died
at twenty-three days

people said, at least you didn't
get too attached

she had married at sixteen, she
married again twenty years later
she said she loved her first husband
just couldn't manage life

five small children? I said
no not that
what? him?
no me, she said
I couldn't get over that baby girl
everyone else did, the big
kids, you'll drive us all crazy
they said, but that baby, you can't
believe her beautifulness
when I came into the kids' room
in her little crib, not a month old
not breathing, they say get over it
it's more than ten years, go away, leave
us for a while, so I did that, here I am she said
where are you going


* Note * I added commas where the author put none. She intended wide spaces instead, but blogger keeps auto editing out my tabs and squishing all text together.

Of Clippings and Travel

I'm a clipper.

It started with my mom. She's a clipper, too. I'm forever getting envelopes in the mail filled with newspaper stories or magazine text she thinks I would find of interest.

The other week, for example, she mailed me an obituary for a dog that she spotted in her local paper.

Before that, she mailed me a slim little column about a workshop being offered in her area on "How to Communicate with your Dog." (note reoccurring dog theme)

I inherited this clipping gene. It's a trait that has only been made worse by my work as a freelance writer.

In part, my ability to make money from writing depends on my ability to narrow in on interesting little tidbits that I think I could turn into larger stories and sell.

I am forever tearing chunks of text out of every publication that comes my way. The clippings pile up and turn into mounds that irritate my hubby who finds it taxing to live amongst my "papers," which I am physically unable to contain to just one room of the house.


My travel lust has only exasperated the situation as I rip out stories on places I think I'd like to go. I have a file drawer full of articles, essays, restaurant recommendations, off-the-beaten path finds and other odds and ends about places here and places there.

Luckily, I've got a couple of good girlfriends who are also chronic clippers.

Even better, they are friends that share my wanderlust. This means that most of the clippings they send me are about far-off locals to which we've usually traveled together. I return the favor. In this way, our trips and memories of distant places stay alive.

My most recent clippings-for-friends have both involved Guatemala, a country to which I traveled years ago. These two are bound for my travel buddy Michelle.

The first is about an overcrowded Guatemalan bus (chicken bus no doubt) that went off the road, rolled down a mountain side and killed many.

The second is about four travelers kidnapped by farmers in the Rio Dulce area.

Michelle and I rode those overcrowded Guatemala chicken busses. We stared out over the edges of steep, thin roads praying praying praying the driver kept us all on the blacktop.

And we boated it through Rio Dulce, too.

I re-read these clippings now and I think, "Were we stupid? Insane? Reckless? We were just dumb lucky? How did we ever make it out of Guatemala alive?"

It's a good thing these clippings aren't headed to my mom. I'd never get out of the country again.

Photo: That would be Michelle in the back of a pick up truck with a Guatemalan chicken bus coming up behind.

Of Brevity and Travel

I picked up this book and I couldn't put it down. I had to buy it.

It's called Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure.

The pages are filled with six-word quotes that tell a life story. For example:

"Never should have bought that ring." by Paul Bellows

OR

"I recognize red flags faster now." by Barbara Burri

OR

"Followed rules not dreams. Never again." by Margaret Hellerstein

I'm drawn to the brevity - yet vastness - of these six-word memoirs and it didn't take long before my mind was connecting this six-word thing to the concept of travel.

Many travelers share this: You go out into the world, experience epiphanies and then come home and try to squeeze yourself back into the mold you filled before you left.

It rarely works and it's always frustrating as nobody really wants to hear a detailed account of your travel-induced realizations.

When friends/family/co-workers ask, "How was your trip?" they aren't hoping for a two-hour retelling involving slides. They want a simple answer. Something brief. Like:

I had a really fun time.

OR

So nice. I got to relax.

Notice, please, the six-word structure of both these replies.

Is a six-word response about all anyone wants to hear of somebody else's travel experience?

If so, could I come up with six-word strings to adequately sum-up some of my biggest trips?

Here's what I've come up with. At times the travel spot is obvious, and other times, not so much. Here we go:

Semester in Spain. Never the same.

Left my heart in Buenos Aires.

Traveling sola. Sometimes lonely. Often not.

Guatemala. Stool Sample. Giardia. Oh shit.

When I travel, I find God.

From Mexico to Myanmar to married.


Photo: Cover art Not Quite What I Was Planning