Day 254 - Home from the Trees

We spent the morning with my grandmother, stopped briefly back at my mom's, and then dashed off again to go to the jeweler to have some stones we bought in India set and to meet up with my dad for lunch before driving down to VA Beach to see Cz's mom. With a schedule like that, it is easy to see how it has not yet registered that we are done travelling. We may have made it all the way around the world, but we are in no way yet still.

Everyone we see seems to greet us with 'What a phenomenal experience', or something of that ilk. It was a phenomenal experience, but a part of me feels like I missed it. Throughout the trip, I was so focused on each country as we experienced it, or on planning the next destination that I never felt like I had the time to step back and reflect on the journey as a whole. As the months telescoped down into weeks, days, and finally just hours, I found myself wondering where all the time had gone. It felt like we had been gone only few weeks rather than more than half a year.

And that may not be entirely a bad thing. Part of the joy of taking time out of one's everyday routine is to live more in the moment. Living in the moment on this trip opened us up to a depth of experience that we probably would have missed had we been trying to keep the scope of the whole thing in perspective at all times. On the flip side, each section of the trip feels like its own entity. I have trouble connecting that we finished the Camino, rode camels in the Indian desert, walked across the Himalayas, and visited Korea's DMZ all in the same voyage. Because I never looked on the trip as a whole, I feel like I missed a significant part of the experience.

Perhaps that understanding is only possible in hindsight. It is not possible to be physically two places at once, just so, neither is it possible to be mentally two places at once. Ironically in eight months, the one luxury we never had was time. Only in hindsight, do we have the luxury of choosing to pull up a certain memory and mull it over. Or to sit with a cup of tea and reflect on the experience as a whole.

Over the next few months I plan to read through this blog (I haven't actually read most of the posts - I write them, Cz edits them, and off they go to the interweb without a second glance from me.) I think I might be surprised by what I find. By reading the blog, looking at photos, and trolling my own memories, I hope to be able to feel some kind of though line on the adventure. As I read and mull and jot notes and sketches, I hope that I can coalesce the experience into a travel book.

With luck, it will be a travel book that other people will want to read, and so be published. With even more luck, maybe enough people will read it that the royalties will help fund a trip to South America, or China, or Africa, or the Balkans... If there's one thing I learned planning and going on this trip it's that there are always more places to go.

There's an adage that goes something like "Of all the places I roam, the finest of these is home." There's another saying that says "You can never come home again." Both I think are true.

Home, when one is gone for more than a few months, takes on a tinge of memory and nostalgia. Even if home doesn't really change, it will not match the Home with a capital 'H' that has formed in one's mind. For me, home as I remember it has ceased to exist. Because we knew we would only be in NYC for 9 months, we subleted someone else's apartment, and when she returned, put our remaining books, clothes and tools in storage, never establishing roots in the big city. In January 2007, my horse died. For as long as I can remember, the front yard had been defined by the fences of her, and her predecessors' paddocks. Soon after we left in June 2007, the fences were finally pulled down. The landscape of my memory was irrevocably altered. In October, Home with a capital 'H', my childhood home, was demolished to make way for a new house. It is a good change - my mother is much happier with the new house, and it is a solid, well laid-out, good building - but it means that even without the filters of nostalgia, there is no way for me to return Home as I knew it.

Home with a capital 'H' now lies in the people we love - in the familiar faces and personality tics, in the cats who still find the warmest sunbeams, and in the daffodils that resolutely bloom along the now-gone fence lines. Because we left no home to which we could return in the city, it is now up to Cz and I to build a Home for ourselves. We have found the geography of our new Home in the form of four rooms and a two year lease in Manhattan. We have the foundations in each other, our families, our friends, and our experiences. With luck and time, we hope to build something beautiful with many windows to eight months where Home was nothing more than 2 forty litre packs and each other, and nothing less than the whole wide world.