This Time, That Way

October 14, 2014 JG Leave a comment

From the house where I’m staying, I can see the sound. I’m about 100 yards from the beach. This past weekend, following my nephew down there to be his steadying arm while he placed his two-year-old feet on logs like a novice on the balance beam, I realized how seldom I go down to the water, despite it being so close to home. Literally, so close to my house. But the next day, seated on the deck with my feet on the railing, the sun waning, and a book in my lap, I realized why: because it’s so fantastic when you walk out the door, it’s hard to understand the need to go the extra 100 yards.

The same is true while hiking. The trip around Mountain Lake, just under four miles of trail that crosses a damn, a number of bridges, has one manageable switchback and a million magnificent trees, is so pleasant, so wonderfully beautiful, familiar, and yummy smelling – in rain and sun – that it’s hard to bother with any other trail, say the one up to Twin Lakes, or down to Cascade Falls and across to Sunrise Rock.

I swore when I came back to the states that I would make everything familiar unfamiliar, do normal things anew, to keep my love affair with the world alive. Settling into my month of doing nothing, I’ve discovered just how difficult that is to do when the status quo is so damned blissful. But what are we missing by not pushing ourselves a little farther? How will we know, if we don’t try?

The hobgoblin of all that pleasantness is complacency. It’s not just that the deck is pleasant, or the trip around Mountain Lake, nice. They are each so much more wonderful than one can imagine, experiences that make one feel truly lucky to be a part of them, even when they have been done over and again for decades. It becomes a challenge to push for a different fantastic, blessed experience. When something seems so wonderful as it is, even when experienced over and over again, how do we convince ourselves that there is something out there, easily attainable, that is even MORE fantastic? If we raise the bar, we run the risk of not meeting it, even when all signs point to the hurdle being, in this circumstance, low. Do we have to feign dissatisfaction? Dare we risk disappointment by choosing to call even the good status-quo, not good enough?

I say yes, risk it. Risk it often. The world is capable of constant surprise, if we just give it the chance. The Mountain Lake trail is the best, but when the bridge was out for a month, I started going to Twin Lakes, and you know what? Even better. Better because different. Slightly longer, in the woods with a wider, more foot-sure path, and then the prize of the lakes at the end. A steady, gradual up, followed by a steady, gradual return. A different set of people hiking it.

A wider, more foot-sure path

Go to the beach. You can hear the waves from the house, but you can hear them better from the shore. You can smell the ions flushing through their crest, shallow and gentle though it may be. Relax into the repetitive motion of failing to skip a rock, and eventually, it will surprise you by bouncing up off the surface and jumping a few times before plopping down below.

Don’t judge. Don’t call yourself lazy, or complacent, or unwilling. It’s ok to appreciate all that you are, and all that you have, and still seek more. Because it isn’t more – it is different that we seek. This time, go THAT way, the way you haven’t gone before. Seek, and ye shall find your different.

Trunk across the path of life: a new opportunity to duck and keep going.

Life Skills

Go Fly a Kite

September 10, 2014 JG 2 Comments

For weeks, I’ve been longing to just do nothing. Many of you think that’s what I’ve been doing for a year, but I believe a scroll through the blog section of my site will disabuse you of that notion. Despite returning to the states, I’m still moving around, and I’m doing it less efficiently than before.

Before, it was me, a big pack, and a day pack. I was a well-oiled traveling machine. These days, it’s me, a little duffle of clothes, a computer bag, a duffel of ‘stuff,’ and the random accoutrement that collects in my car – hiking boots, bathing suit, towel, dog blanket (despite having yet to be reunited with dog), extra quart of oil. Where before I was home-free, I’m now homeless, carting belongings around the northwest, losing bits by the wayside as I go.

My insides reflect that scattered-belonging appearance. The months I traveled, I experienced everything from the here and the now. I may have been planning the next place, but I did it from a very conscious present. From a courtyard in Bogota, I purchased a plane ticket to Santa Marta, a bus ticket to Cartagena, a plane trip to Bolivia. From a beer garden in Saigon, I reserved hotel rooms in Jordan, sending the details to a friend in Denver. The courtyard was bound in magenta bougainvillea, and the beer garden hosted a Vietnamese singer covering American classic rock. I may have been addressing the logistics of another place and time, but I was doing it from a very present self. A very centered one. It was invigorating.

Now, I am anxious and scattered. I think I am done traveling, but I’ve continued to move. I’ve slept in ten different places since returning from Spain at the end of June. I rotate between a few, on a schedule set usually a week (or less) in advance. While on this merry-go-round of homestays, I’m masterminding where I’ll settle, what I’ll do for work when I get there, whether it’s the right thing to do. I fall asleep fitfully, rearranging schedules and geographies in my head (usually in favor of the calendar with the shortest amount of time between me and a reunion with the dog). I worry I’ve over-stayed my welcome at one place, and another, and another. When daylight meets my open eyes, I make lists of tasks to complete in hopes of wrangling in my wild and blurry future. I’m tired in a place that coffee never touches and sleep never rests.

But this month, I’m on Orcas. A month of doing nothing. Doing nothing is rarely, actually, nothing. In fact, it’s one of the hardest tasks to accomplish. If you don’t believe me, try it. Put whatever you’re reading this on down, and take deep slow breaths for three full minutes.

Felt like an eternity, didn’t it? Like emptying your mind so you can meditate, doing nothing is actually very, very difficult. So I will work my way there. I started this afternoon by flying a kite in wind that blew up off the ocean. While lying in the grass looking up at it, I noticed the apple tree is in fervent production mode, so I took a picture. Tomorrow I may pick some and make applesauce.

My nothing won’t come all at once. It’s going to come after a couple hikes, the books I checked out of the library today, some kite-flying and some deep, deep breaths. When it comes, as it comes, though, my nothing will be full of wonder, and focus, and rejuvenation. It will be full of vivid, short, present moments that will last an eternity.

Life Skills, On the Road, Tourist, Traveling, United States

Where I’m From

April 17, 2014 JG 1 Comment

Three months before I turned 40, I spent a month obsessively looking at new cars on craigslist. When I realized I was perfectly happy with my 12 year-old stick shift station wagon, I left the cars behind and decided just to pierce my nose, like I’d wanted to do since I was 14. Suddenly, I was freed from the socially-acceptable expectations of mid-life, and welcomed into the decade that would allow me to just be me. Midlife crisis narrowly averted.

Not even a full state from Texas, a crisis of an entirely different order arose. I took refuge from a torrential downpour at a café on the Taos plaza, and got to talking to a woman about her dog. Naturally, she asked me where I was from. A normally chatty human being who can carry on a conversation with anyone from the Pope to a wall, I was struck silent. I didn’t even stutter; I just couldn’t answer. I was faced with a geographic identity crisis.

For the eight, mostly uncomfortable years I lived in Dallas, I told people, “I live in Dallas, but I’m from California.” This is the technical truth – I was born in San Francisco, and consider myself a Californian – but it isn’t the whole story. I arrived in Dallas a full seven locations after I originally left my home state. As a result, I’m a committed recycler with aggressive driving skills, a very northeastern way of flipping the bird, a New Yorker’s style of walking through a crowded urban center ignoring everyone around me, a Northwestern desire to be outside even when the weather fills with rain and wind, and a Texan belief that my boots and a good buckle should work for any occasion. When I say, “I’m going home,” I could be referring to Seattle, San Francisco, or Dallas. But I don’t know how to tell someone where I’m from, because choosing one place feels like a lie.

I hoped this issue would resolve itself when I left the country, but it got worse. Complete strangers took a kind-hearted interest in the specifics of my personal history, and weren’t satisfied when I told them simply, “I’m from the United States.” People in other countries know a surprising number of US states; they also watch a lot of bad tv. Texas is on the map for Dallas (the original), Walker Texas Ranger, and George Bush. Telling people I’m from California garnered a lot of, “I’ll be back,” “oh…Ah-nald,” and, “California?…Hollywood?” So I tried Washington.

Cold, beautiful west coast

Understandably, it’s confusing to foreigners that the state of apples, Starbucks, and the Olympic peninsula is both not the same as the capital city that shares its name, and is located on the other side of the country. I didn’t bother correcting people who responded to Washington with, “ah! Obama’s house,” until the questions about DC got too involved, and I would confess that I was actually from an entirely different place (though I’ve lived in both).

Washington State

The irony of all this is that it actually doesn’t matter. In earlier eras, outside of Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, and great migrations, people rarely moved far from home. Now, we’re in a shrinking global community, where constant population flux consistently alters cultures, blending them across geographic boundaries, until good barbeque isn’t just found in the south and good bagels aren’t held captive in New York. The San Francisco of 2013, with its dot com billionaires and microapartments for a million dollars, isn’t the San Francisco of 1993, with its distinct neighborhoods, affordable housing, and hippy funk. (When people ask me if I’m moving back to San Francisco, I feel compelled to point out that San Francisco isn’t there anymore.)

And yet, for all this movement, for all this homogeneity of culture, place matters. When I go out for coffee, place matters. Am I walking there, biking there, driving there, or taking public transportation? Is it Dunkin’s coffee, Starbucks coffee, local coffee, organically sourced and priced up coffee? Or maybe it’s Turkish, Thai, or Vietnamese white coffee? Is it hot or cold? Is it smooth roasted, or bitter? Am I standing at the coffee bar chatting with neighbors, sitting at an outdoor café under a heat lamp, or grabbing it to go while I drive off someplace?

Place matters for the most simple things, because it’s the simple things that form who we are. The personality of a place shapes our approach to the world; it demonstrates for us how we absorb information, how we respond to stimuli around us, and how we view what we see moving forward. Thirty years ago, when I moved from the Bay area to Boston, this mattered a hundred times more.

I left a place of cold oceans with rough surf and foggy-day picnics on the beach, of yoga and recycling and home-made peanut butter, and went to the land of green pants with blue whales, classmates related to passengers on the Mayflower, and ‘one if by land two if by sea.’ As a result, though I longed regularly for the west coast of my childhood, I was raised using the T, rooting for the Celtics, watching my first baseball game from the Fenway bleachers, and busing out to Great Woods for one concert after another. There is no mistaking that these experiences gave me some of the independence that I enjoy when I travel, and that the longing to get back to the other coast, to see what was beneath me when I flew from one to another, gave me my desire to actually buy a plane ticket and do it.

New York subway

So when I tell people I’m from California, I feel like I’m disrespecting half of my roots. And I feel like my roots have more than two halves. Didn’t summers on a small island in Puget Sound teach me to love reading, staring at the water, and the smell of fresh wind? Didn’t college in New York help me understand that I can only do cities for a moment before I shut down? Don’t we continue to grow, to absorb place and its personality, and to change as a result, throughout our lives? I didn’t move to Texas until I was 30, but didn’t it warm me a bit, teach me a about expressing myself respectfully to people with opposing viewpoints, and help me understand myself better? Isn’t growth and absorption of place the only thing that explains Madonna’s fake British accent?

For all the shrinking of the world, place still matters. The more we create these hybrid humans who herald from multiple cultures, possibly without much leaving their own, the more confusing the question ‘where are you from’ will become. I, for one, am looking forward to it, so I’m not the only one suffering from a geographic identity crisis.

Crazy Dallas weather

Life Skills, On the Road, Traveling

About a Girl

February 13, 2014 JG 5 Comments

It will shock no one to know that the blog essay, “Don’t Date a Girl Who Travels,” (originally posted in May 2013 and recently picked up by Huffington Post and Thought Catalog, among others) has been sent my way a number of times in the last few weeks. Always, the sender noted that s/he was thinking of me, out here wandering the world, living out my own wildest dreams, and a few of theirs as well.

I kept it to myself that I find the essay totally offensive. After all, I was in Africa when it began arriving. Who cares about bad writing and publicity politics when there are cheetahs to track?

Cheetahs that were tracked

Then I was tagged in someone’s Facebook share of the article and a commenter included a link to a response that upgraded the original to something more than drivel. By that time, I was in a riad in Fes, only mildly interested to discover a hullabaloo on the internet about the original post, and a number of responses, many of which are equally superficial. Since the subject, via link, or comment, or email, has continued to come my way, I will take a solitary Madrid afternoon minute to tell you what I think.

How can I care about silly HuffPost politics when my riad room looks like this?!

If poor writing were the crux of the issue, I would snark and move on. But it isn’t, though that certainly led readers astray. Weak structure fails the satirical tone of the piece and readers are left unable to determine whether the author seriously thinks that a girl who travels, “doesn’t plan or have a permanent address…Chances are she can’t hold a steady job.” Or, as I think is her intent, does the author mean that someone who travels is independent, craves new experience, and prioritizes a travel opportunity over security?

Stephabroad.com addressed this in her rewrite, which took the original premise and turned it proactive, returning some ownership of the girl and her desires to the girl herself. Rather than focus on aging skin and instability, or try to convince a guy that it’s ok the traveler won’t go clubbing with him, Stephabroad notes how diligently the traveler seeks the world and what there is to learn in it, and how compatible that makes her with someone who shares these values, if not her habits. Written as it is, this version gives the girl credit for volition and experience.

And yet I still take umbrage:

This is not a girl about whom we speak. It is a woman. And we should all be less afraid of calling her such. She deserves it. In all versions of the piece, this protagonist makes her own money. She makes her own reservations. She carries her own pack and walks home at night down unfamiliar streets.

A sort of dark and very unfamiliar street in Marrakech

On a regular basis, she makes decisions of calculated risk that would make a wall street trader cower. Her life is a gamble of safety and adventure, joy and sorrow, experience, loss, and gain. She who has hugged a foreign and likely filthy toilet bowl for a long night of purging the wrong market stall of food from her system, and survived to hop the next bus is no longer a girl, she is a woman. She who holds her head high while a carpet dealer discusses the sharmouta who won’t buy, and lets that not dampen her opinion of the country she explores is not a girl, she is a woman. And she deserves the respect of being called such.

The semantic error – and our constant fear of addressing it – underlies a larger cultural issue with the piece: even when heralding the independence of a woman, the author can’t think of anything more original than a traditional gender paradigm (dating) to evaluate the worth of her gender. She is trying to convince men not to be afraid of her, and her ‘shortcomings’ which may make her slightly less palatable in traditional roles.

Are you kidding me with this?

Here’s a piece of news for you: the chick who travels doesn’t give a shit whether you want to date her. You don’t get to make this choice on her behalf. She already knows that, if you need convincing, you aren’t the one she wants. This life she lives is about the choices she makes, the work she puts in, the desires she chases. It’s not about convincing a traditional world to figure out how to accept her. The original writer knows this – she is a former corporate employee who took a career break and is now a surfer and yoga teacher. She just isn’t able to write it.

The chick who travels, chasing her desires above the cloud cover in the High Atlas (photo credit: Paul Allen)

Unlike that original writer, I don’t speak for all women who travel. I speak for no one but myself, and here is my response: I am a woman, and I don’t want to be dated. I want to be adventured with. I want a man who can see the way the blue of an iceberg nuzzling against the shore of a lake in Torres del Paine thrills me to wondered stillness, and respect that being my moment of reflection. Sometimes, we will share these moments of awe. And sometimes, we will mutually appreciate them afterwards, in a warm pub over beer, and they will be no less valued. Awe, travel experience, and love can all be separate and equal.

Iceberg blue in Torres del Paine National Park, Chile

This article fails to recognize that part of the impetus to explore the world stems in part from dissatisfaction with the roles available to one at home. It isn’t just in countries where shariah prevails over women to wrap their hair in scarves that opportunity lacks. In the US and in many developed countries, social paradigms and their resulting power structures fail to recognize that women aren’t paperdoll cut-outs. Women who travel refuse to be tab-folded and dressed in outfits suitable for a given occasion. (Although, like a paper doll, I have about six outfits in my wardrobe right now…) And so we take a chance to look around the world first-hand and see what our other options may be.

Looking around (and under) the world for options (photo credit: Sander den Haring)

When I was young, my father used to tell me, “a girl without freckles is like a night without stars.” It is a sweet sentiment, when you are young. Now that I am on the night side of 40, I am endeared to the saying out of nostalgia, but the language, like that article, is problematic, because I am not a girl, and I don’t want to be evaluated on the basis of my face. My aged face, full of freckles, is in fact like a night sky full of stars, lit from within by a fire that started burning long ago, both fed and drained by travel across time and space. Its origin may be long gone, may be darkened by forces we won’t see in this lifetime, but in its present, it is brilliant and magical and strong enough to navigate oceans.

I am a woman, and this fact is more than just the failed semantics of a Huffpost article. It is a lifetime in the making. A lifetime of experience, of love, of adventure and heartbreak and bruises and bad train rides and good break ups and difficult jobs and random rewarding encounters. It is hard work and joyful leisure to be a woman, and regardless of who may or may not want to date me, regardless of who wants my journey for his own, I have my soul full of fires, lit over a lifetime. You can take that, or leave it, you decide. I’ll decide whether you are worth dating – or reading. Right now, I have a plane to catch.

Creating a day of adventure and bruises.

Dallas, Life Skills, Preparing, Traveling

Packing It In

July 21, 2013 JG 2 Comments

The problem with packing is this: it forces you to consider every item or habit you’ve stuffed away in the dark corners of your literal and figurative closets. It starts as a logistical puzzle (why do wine racks not fit in any normal sized box?) and inevitably (d)evolves into a psychological review at the worst possible time. What’s better than a personality assessment in the middle of a giant change? Packing is the process of taking stock: Who are you? What have you done? What are you neglecting?

Forensically, here’s what one could deduce about me from the items that have now been pulled from my apartment and packed away in a climate-controlled 9’x23’ storage unit:

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Worth Packing In

the little truth of traveling

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