COLUMN #77, 04 June, 2003
Why I Travel

Traveler At Large | Don George


I love learning about the cultural diversity of the world – how some children grow up learning to speak out while others watch and absorb; the etiquette adults live by; religious beliefs and rites; the words we are taught to use and the things we say without words.

And finally, I love learning about the human diversity of the world – about the mind-stretching variety of people, young and middle-aged and old, that populate this planet.

You can categorize all these learnings, but the really rich truth is that they're all jumbled together in the glorious multi-sensual swirl of reality. You take in a Balinese puppet play at the end of a rice paddy with torches flaming in the background and old men smoking in the shadows and the fat hiss and smell of skewered chicken sizzling in the blue moonlight. It's a three-dimensional multi-sensual piece of the global puzzle.

As I travel, I keep gathering these pieces. I try to enjoy each and every piece for what it is, and at the same time, I try to fit them together, to discern the grand design into which each piece locks. In this sense, I suppose, I ultimately believe that travel will bring me closer to God, whatever God is and wherever God resides.

As I write these words, sitting on a terrace overlooking a green, serene northern California scene, with birds twittering in the dusky trees and the clink of dinner dishes wafting in on a backyard-barbecue breeze, I think that maybe the puzzle is God, and that all of my travels, all of my learnings, all of my encounters, are incantations and prayers and koans – little piercings of the celestial curtain.

And I think that the best we can do is to approach the world with love – that is, with a deep, respectful passion and curiosity. I think that the best we can do is take everything we experience and learn into ourselves with that spirit of love and then give it back to all the new places and new people we encounter. It's a global give and take, a bridge-building between the self and the world. The bridge gets deeper, stronger, longer each time, and so does the self.

In the end, I guess, if you could travel enough and live enough, you would encompass the world; you would contain it all inside you. And then you would know that you were nothing but the sum of everything outside you.

But for now I'm content with these backyard birds and barbecues, with the music of my daughter singing in her room, with her globe that sits beside me and the larger globe we sit upon. A neighbor sets out plates on a table under the blue bowl of the sky; a jet streaks by.

On a sidewalk in Los Angeles someone sucks on a hookah, and in Paris, a young lover studies Monet's poppies with a sigh. A woman weaves an intricate shawl, a gamelan gongs, a tea master whisks a venerable bowl, blue and green, before an apprentice's glittering eyes.

The world awaits, full of surprise.



  posted by spidergrrl @ 1:08 PM