Spring Moon of the Southern Cross
On feeling my way back home.
In the first instance travel demands surrender. Means, give up the comforts of home, the usual, the way things are done, for some others home, usual, way things are done. Without surrender travel cuts and slices at every moment. Well, I never! We’d not see that at home! Why did he do that?
In the second instance travel requires curiosity. Who knew cacao beans had such a pleasant tasting pulp? How did Panama make the shift from indigenous people to Spaniards to Colombia to the US and then to their own democracy? How do limenos celebrate the New Year? What do the Chilean fjords look like anyhow? Without curiosity there are no new experiences, only the repetition of old ones in different locales.
In the third instance travel invites hope. This visit to the Chan Chan Citadel will be worth the effort and expense. This trip as a whole will repay the cost of it in money with the more useful coin of new experience and changed ideas.
There is, too, wonder. At the arrogance and audacity of the Spanish conquistadors. At the earthquake defying architectural skills of the Inka. At the splendid isolation of Ushuaia. At the glaciers still crashing and booming their way through the Darwin Cordillera. At sitting, finally, at the southernmost point in the Americas.
Perhaps, when we were at our best, there is, as well, love. It will not always come, but here the acceptance, the embrace of the other can loop to the acceptance and the embrace of the other within, that stranger in your own soul who still feels foreign, alien to your Self.
This love recognizes the sad and searing truth that we press down the parts of ourselves we fear, reducing them to fragments of memory, shards of dark feeling and says, wait. There’s more. Whole cultures built on what you reject. Art forms erected from the very things you fear. Places where the dance tune includes even your most minor key melodies. And does a gavotte, or a jig, or the two-step to them.
So then, surrender, curiosity, hope, wonder and love. Travel’s comrades, partners along the way. And welcome.
This is by way of saying that feeling my back home is not home sickness or nostalgia, it is a desire to return to my place altered, made more, fuller, richer. Not too soon though. Just in time.
