The Road’s Consistency
Home and settled, now travel bound—it is a constant push and pull between the nature of yin and yang. A traveler is a traveler for life, and to be home is equally a journey as it is while on the road, but there’s a vast difference, a change in perspective. And it’s from this new perspective the traveler takes to the road yet again.
Last week I spent my Sunday evening at a National Geographic Live! presentation introducing Wade Davis, a cultural anthropologist who has spent his time with various indigenous communities throughout the hidden world. Forty-eight hours prior to his Seattle appearance, the nomadic Indiana Jones himself was in Columbia filming a documentary. What was unique about his experience abroad, as well as his presence back in North America, was he almost didn’t return.
Think about that… He almost didn’t come back. He almost died. He almost disappeared. He almost changed so much so that he didn't return home as he once was. He was almost kidnapped by the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia).
This has been my mantra while settled at home: The only thing constant is change. Change is constant. I itch in the presence of persons like Wade Davis, before the pages written by authors like Pico Iyer and Aidan Hartley. I squirm to well-composed articles and blogs. And inside I cry at images that capture the essence of culture, the freedom of exploration and the reality of life as an artform. I need this mantra as a traveler—change is constant, change is constant—and I require it as a person with passion for new faces, people and adventures…constantly…
New Growth & Old Growth
Growing roots at home is a difficult task, yet it’s an evolving feat as I observe my surroundings with a new eye, aware and at interest as if I were arriving home for the very first time. I remember back to my initial experience abroad, alone at nineteen and left to the jaws of a snarling unknown:
One in front of the other; first the right, then the left, back and forth in fashion, a movement toward places unimaginable, places beyond the scope of thinking. I was in fear.
Yet for now, this contrast of fear and freedom, of fear being freedom; this concept of pure imagination and deep realization meant nothing. It didn’t surface. It didn’t guide, direct or lead. My awareness was dormant and had been for years. For now, I stepped outside the confines of my block hotel and advanced into the unknown. There were mountains and valleys, their caves and jungles descending deep into the sands and the shore. The beaches and water. The waves and their sounds curling upon one another. Then the reveries and distant persons across the planet that were discovered directly inside my psyche. They were always there, always acting as part of my integral core of being. The life waiting to be lived. I entered my dreams during that first step into the world with my heart in the lead. Inside, devoid of noise, was a shadow, and it wanted to be lit.
This was the first day away from home on my own in an unfamiliar country with an unfamiliar dialect spoken by an unfamiliar culture. Bangkok. Everything around me outside my personality was unfamiliar. Only within did I harbor the noticeable familiarities. Yet, despite the things I always grasped, the material and shit I clung to from birth, with family to friends, by society and its education—these piles of familiar beliefs were about to change.
Swift movements brought me to the edge of an empty street. Without delay, the rubber soles dropped onto the cool morning’s asphalt. Around me the day’s air was heavy despite its early hours; moist with a dampness that weakened my bones. The less the better, I thought. The less clothing, the less weight, the less possessions—the better. It was a common freedom unconsciously betrayed by man, and then and there I felt it for the first time. I breathed it. I began to sweat it. I tasted it on my lips and in the back of my throat. This freedom involving less scratched my mind into frays. Yes, my pants were too thick for this humid air.
As I began to cross the deserted street outside my hotel entrance, a man spotted the solitary stride. Standing up from a waist high wall he approached, appearing from underneath the shades of a large, leafy pipal tree.
“Tuk-tuk? I take you everywhere!” In an exaggerated excitement, the man sold his service. His speech was thick, happy, but pitched with scorn.
“N-no,” I stuttered. “Thanks… I’m fine.” Caught off guard, disillusioned and unfamiliar with the offering, I searched for a barrier and quickly recovered. In repetitious elegance, I brought myself back together and kept walking.
“But boy! I take you all over; to sites, temples, markets, riversides, and the jewelry shops!” This man pressed. He needed me. “I know very, very cheap one you like.” Hidden in shadow, his face pleaded behind the division of light.
Young, alone—and American—I caught drift of this sense of fright. It was overwhelming inside my nervous system. For years it was attune to the comfort and ease of living, the blue prints of classes, homework, food and play—and again as the next day progresses—classes homework food play. But this was new, this man. He was a new face, a new person, a new experience, and unheeding to my inner desires for such revelatory appearances on my first day in a culture so far removed from my own habitual familiarities, I ignored this man and nervously quickened my pace. Hastily I replied to my fading intruder like a possum waddling across Highway 101: “No. I don’t want. I don’t need. And I have seen.”
“Even jewelry? No,” he paused. “You have not seen.” But the man’s last inquiry failed because I remained silent and receded deeper into the mind’s bubble. Today, I know it as fear. I know it as the unknown and the uncertain. But then, I was unaware despite my searched for it. I finally found it.
Across the street, my soles glided onto the adjacent curb and my pace continued steadfast. Steady were the feet, hurrying and hurling themselves forward with a blotted anxiety. Upon my roots, skin wrapped tightly around the bones, outlining the structural base. It held them like a compactor constantly condensing, cradling its contents—groaning, twitching, humming under motion. It pressed in upon the skeletal system, nurturing the movements like the marrow deep within its’ passages. And the veins bulged like frightened puffer fish, spiny and stiff to surrounding species.
Clear-Cutting The Tourist’s Mind
This was my unknown. This was my voyage into the outer and inner world where I never return. I’m still there, searching, traveling the voyage. And I remain there in that space of uncertainty, thriving for it like a pack mule recently freed from its weight. Like Wade Davis, I almost didn’t return. But unlike Davis, I know I’ve never returned and never will. On this next journey I will leave just the same: never to return. I will be lost and found in a land of my own paradise, one with the warmth of imagination and the crush of waves upon the mind’s sets of weary thoughts.
Back home as I prepare, I question the old perspective, one that will form the new. A guest asked Mr. Davis on Sunday night how not to be a tourist while traveling, how best to see the culture and be one’s own anthropologist. There was no answer. It was up to the traveler’s own consciousness. Be the culture. Live it. Breathe it. Eat it and feed it.
Ask yourself: Am I a tourist? Am I not a tourist?
Wade reiterated: We are all tourists. We are all guests on this planet. It’s our home as much as our own bedrooms are our individual sacred spaces; and it is our home as much as it is home to the Penan of Sarawak in Borneo—the last remaining nomads of SE Asia. We are here to tour planet earth, but it’s with a fine degree of awareness that delineates a tourist from a citizen. A tourist scratches the surfaces, follows the path well wore into the earth and relies on the known, the certain and a safety without the sense of fear. You are a tourist.
On the same level of humanity but on the opposite scale of consciousness, a citizen abolishes these ways or certitude and creates his/her own, constantly changing oneself, continuously dissolving into the surroundings present. You are a world citizen, a cultural anthropologist with tuned senses. You are a nomadic tourist and you live to travel and travel to live. This is your home in entirety.
It is with this awareness that I continue to attempt to settle in the Pacific Northwest and likewise prepare my perspectives for dissolution once more as I entered this day into a world of new faces, people and adventures.
