About katmaureen
My desire to travel is a brew steeped in the yellowed images my Father shared of his voyages overseas during the years he went to war. Born in 1925, in the Marines in 1943 he travelled, and fought, in the southern Pacific, Korea, Vietnam. He was a quiet guy, brought home gifts for his kids and photographs.....but few words to describe his experiences. The horrors he faced (Chosin Reservoir just one) he didn't share. Those slideshows were so strange and mystery filled. We watched these slideshows every year at least once, sometimes moreoften; youngsters in pajamas on our bellies on the floor...sharing the strangeness of travel to foreign lands.
All of the slides of Japan, Korea and other Asian destinations were tinted by the oranges, yellows and reds of the architectural landscapes my Father found. Vietnam was green. Young men with rifles sepia and filtered with their comradery.
I wasn't encouraged to travel. I wasn't encouraged towards anything really.
I'm not a tourist; don't like destination travel but I am uncomfortable at home. Itchy. I have always needed to leave home for comfort. I'm not always social...currently I travel to be alone. I am awed by simple landscapes and tiny discoveries. The sculptural statements of a broken twig speak to me more loudly than craft or art. I have never found anything created by humans that bested what I found in nature.
I am 55. I believe foreign lands can be very close........sometimes a block or two away...sometimes in the next room. Though I lived and worked in Africa for nearly 5 years it isn't a place I can describe only a place where people I grew to know happened to live, it is a setting (as are all physical places) for events to occur. I wish that respect for others was a virus like a virus people caught from travelling and that there were no cure.
I am in the middle of something, a change perhaps. I've worked in construction or taught about construction most of my life and that is done. I find myself a nomad, without a physical home and without a commitment to a place or particular employment. My child is grown and strong in her own life. I am rediscovering curiousity. I am exceptionally happy and solo on the road.
Travelling is an opportunity for humility, curiousity, compassion, generosity and occasionally a hyper-awareness that I am a very small piece of the pie. This is a blessing.
