Reflections in Transit

Travel presents interesting opportunities for introspection. Thoughts can be playfully and leisurely followed, like a cat pursuing butterfly. I begin these reflections thousands of feet into the sky, our plane passing over the labyrinth of islands and sea which make up Indonesia. Six hours brings me not yet a third of the way on my journey from Sydney via Bangkok to New Delhi where I will arrive this evening.

I have left behind the Australian summer, a city oriented toward play in and around salt water, a peculiar world of collared lizards and brashly colored birds, shadeless trees and pods which germinate only when shattered by the heat of bush fire. I have left a population of distinctly tall people. Maybe there is no discrepancy with the average height back in the US. However, my impression based on the majority of my family and friends in Oz is exemplified by the reality that I, granted only a strapping 5’5″, fit neatly beneath the arm of my 12 year old cousin Jack.

 

Even with a lifelong familiarity with Australian mores, toward the end of this visit I felt I was beginning to discern certain elements of the culture, at least based on my experiences of non-aboriginal populations in New South Wales & Queensland. There is a thought provoking fusion of vaguely British reserve with relaxed informality. The reserve I observed in the more customarily sardonic humor, certain social formalities, dietary inclinations, and greater restraint in the exchange of physical affection. And yet simultaneously this country hangs out in bikinis and board shorts, flip flops, even bare feet and some do so with an unsequestered beer in hand while strolling along the beach.

While the affluent suburbs of Sydney are pervaded by mega houses, old and new, many neighborhoods are made up, almost exclusively of small terrace-houses, moderate to very humble in size and nature. These along with their slightly more rural counterparts, the quintessential one story home, like the one in which my mum grew up just up the street from the Newcastle Iron Works, constitute the majority of my experience of small and mid-sized town Australia. This architectural texture, in conjunction with my experiences with family and friends, seem indicative of a more contented middle class sensibility, not such a drive for acquisition; more, better, bigger. This may or may not move in tandem with the renownedtall poppy syndrome, which at its best supports all to succeed and at worst undermines, even penalizes those with skills, gifts and self driven motivation.

Myriad other comparisons with US culture have been explored in dialogue over the past month; differences in dating and divorce patterns, race relations, relationship to the outside world, travel, market trends regarding technology, organic & whole food, health care both allopathic and alternative, politics etc.

I offer only skewed and limited snapshot of the Australian population and culture. These are simply a few impressions which linger for me as I move across the ocean, attempting to reflect and record certain perceptions before I enter yet another country. I believe it’s easy to assume that sharing a primary language necessarily reveals cultural similarity. While our shared Anglo-Saxon culture undoubtedly provides more likeness than say my autumn experiences in Israel, I think the commonality of language can impose an illusory sense of sameness and even blind us to the subtleties and differences.

 

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There was something rather profound in returning to a place filled with family and friends, many of whom I have not seen in 8 years. When I last traveled in Australia I was 25 years old. I had left Nepal and was circuitously en route to the US. I was bound for Washington State having not lived there in 7 years. I was returning to begin from scratch. With only a B.A. in Political Science & International Studies along some obscure and intense life experiences with health care and death while in Nepal, I had little clue how I was going to find my way into hospice work, which I felt was my place.

In my final days in Australia, several people offered reflections about the differences they see in me now compared to at that juncture in my life. While I recall that chapter being marked by independence and strong self assurance, apparently I also appeared somewhat apprehensive, excitable, even struggling and a bit lost. It is no surprise really. At that threshold I was a piece of driftwood, floating along both open and subject to influence by life’s wind and currents with less clarity as to what the horizon held for me. As I wrote in this travel log’s intention & itinerary, in this chapter of travel there is a sense of openness even hunger to explore the unknown. However, in the midst of that, I also feel a distinct rootedness due to being at a more mature stage in life, the completion of studies which I am passionate and excited to move forward in practicing, and the presence of a companion who continues to provide sustaining encouragement and support.

 

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While with my cousins at Mt Crosby, I pulled Barry Lopez’s About This Life off their library shelves to share with Ewan. I had read the then new book when staying with Rex & Susan 8 years ago. I recall being profoundly moved by Lopez’s essay Learning to See in which he writes of his decision to lay down his camera and career in photography. At that time, I myself was struggling with the separation from the world I felt a lens created. It has only been with the gift of a digital camera last year and the advent of this trip that I have returned to look at the world through a lens with any regularity.

Up at Mt Crosby, it was Ewan who brought my attention to the introduction of Lopez’s book, a passage which I find compelling enough to include here in its entirety. Lopez offers three suggestions for cultivating one’s skills as a writer. However, I believe his insights have implications for not only those interested in writing but for anyone who desires to BE ALIVE! I am almost positive that if I were to go back to my journal from my last Australian visit that I would find the entirety of this passage written in my own pen amongst those pages.

 

Once I was asked by a seatmate on a trans-Pacific flight, a man who took the liberty of glancing repeatedly at the correspondence in my lap, what instruction he should give his fifteen year old daughter, who wanted to be a writer. I didn’t know how to answer him, but before I could think I heard myself saying, “Tell your daughter three things.” Tell her to read, I said. Tell her to read whatever interests her, and protect her if someone declares what she’s reading to be trash. No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language. She may be paying attention to things in the words beyond anyone else’s comprehension, things that feed her curiosity, her singular heart and mind. Tell her to read classics like The Odyssey. They’ve been around a long time because the patterns in them have proved endlessly useful, and to borrow Evan Connell’s observation, with a good book you never touch bottom. But warn your daughter that ideas of heroism, of love, of human duty and devotion that women have been writing about for centuries will not be available to her in this form. To find these voices she will have to search. When, on her own, she begins to ask, make her a present of George Eliot, or the travel writing of Alexandra David-Neel, or ‘To the Lighthouse.’

Second, I said, tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing by reading and by studying books about grammar and the organization of ideas, but that if she wishes to write well she will have to become someone. She will have to discover her beliefs, and then speak to us from within those beliefs. If her prose doesn’t come out of her belief, whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing along information, of which we are in no great need. So help her discover what she means.

Finally, I said, tell your daughter to get out of town, and help her do that. I don’t necessarily mean to travel to Kazakhstan, or wherever, but to learn another language, to live with people other than her own, to separate herself from the familiar. Then, when she returns, she will be better able to understand why she loves the familiar, and will give us a fresh sense of how fortunate we are to share these things. Read. Find out what you truly believe. Get away from the familiar. Every writer, I told him, will offer you thoughts about writing that are different, but these are three I trust.

 

Upon my recent rereading I was, again, moved by his sentiments and counsel. I have been fortunate in having lifelong family encouragement and the intuitive wherewithal to prioritize travel amongst life’s essentials. Travel has indeed been crucial to the process of self discovery and finding my own voice.  And this brings to mind another passage (provided across the wires by my poet professor Ewan), found in Luminous Things an annotated collection edited by Czeslaw Milosz.   He introduces each section with his own reflections and I was deeply moved by his words introducing travel,

In old Arabic poetry, love, song, blood, and travel appear as four basic desires of the human heart and the only effective means against our fear of death. Thus travel is elevated to the dignity of the elementary needs of humankind. “To sail is necessary, to live is not” (Navigare est necesse, nivere non est necesse)—-these words were, according to Plutarch, pronounced by a Roman before the departure of a ship in tempestuous weather. Whatever practical reasons push people out of their homes to seek adventure, travel undoubtedly removes us from familiar sights and from everyday routine. It offers to us a pristine world seen for the first time and is a powerful means of inducing wonder. And since poetry is an expression of wondering at things, landscapes, people, their habits and mores, poetry and travel are allied.

During my recent stretch in Australia, I also discovered renewed appreciation almost a reverence for the role family has played in providing a foundation and touchstone for me throughout my travels and my life. Many of us spend significant portions of our adult lives attempting to elucidate and in some cases liberate ourselves from patterns related to our families of origin. And yet these relationships also provide the very soil from which we emerge and grow into the world. I am blessed by a wealth of family, biological and chosen, throughout the world and by the contribution of these relationships to my life.

In a very tender interchange with cousin Tony days before my departure, he articulated the emotional importance, despite the ocean which separates us, of my parents, brother & me in his sense of family. Likewise, I feel the existence of my extended family has provided me with some very deep taproots, not only due to blood ties, but because of the sense of being ‘known’ and concurrently being a part of something larger than my small self. I cherish that. Similar sentiments arise when I consider other elements of my life in which I am connected to a lineage larger than myself; notably Zen practice and now Chinese medicine. At this writing, I feel expansive and penetrating gratitude for the roots present in my life, the anchoring they confer during this current period of travel.

 

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Upon my arrival in New Delhi I will meet Cris, a friend who I met through meditation practice with the One Drop Sangha in Seattle. In 2002 Cris and his family relocated from Boston to Seattle for his wife’s work at the UW medical center. He spent years of his earlier life studying Zen practice in Japan, later worked as an engineer and in yet another career change finished his nursing degree just before moving out to Seattle. In 2006 Cris traveled with translator & Chinese scholar Bill Porter (Red Pine) to visit temples of the major Zen patriarchs in China. He has remained a dedicated Buddhist practitioner for decades.

For the 8 months prior to leaving the US, I provided acupuncture treatment to Cris for cardiac arrythmias and general wellbeing. Last Spring, as my travel itinerary was taking shape, originally to include time in Nepal, Cris inquired if I would be willing and interested to include a Buddhist pilgrimage in India. He invited me to be a traveling companion and offer OM treatment as needed in exchange for his taking care of traveling expenses. After meeting in New Delhi we will venture northeast on a pilgrimage to include Varanasi, Sarnath, Bodh Gaya, Rajgir, Lumbini, Kapilavasthu then crossing back the border to conclude in Calcutta from where I will fly out on February 9th to Taipei.

 

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During my time in Australia, life experiences were frequently more compelling than the chronicle thereof. Taking that into consideration, along with the likelihood internet access will be more limited and the more contemplative nature of this chapter of travel, I intend to give myself a bit of breathing space from writing in as detailed a manner as I have aspired to do over these recent months. While I will continue this narrative, I envision more succinct entries, be they prose or vignettes in another form.