The Hardest Thing About Traveling

This is why once you’ve traveled for the first time all you want to do is leave again. They call it the travel bug, but really it’s the effort to return to a place where you are surrounded by people who speak the same language as you. Not English or Spanish or Mandarin or Portuguese, but that language where others know what it’s like to leave, change, grow, experience, learn, then go home again and feel more lost in your hometown then you did in the most foreign place you visited.

This is the hardest part about traveling, and it’s the very reason why we all run away again.

Kellie Donnelley.

I wanted to store this piece that talks of the hardest part of traveling.  I need to think about it. 

Travel changes a person or, perhaps, in my case, it turned me into someone I recognised.  I was always curious, I love meeting new people, learning how they live, hearing their stories ... out here in the world I wander, I get to meet others like me. 

I read this quote this morning, and thought ... really?

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone Weil

I always give my attention.  I am curious, and genuinely interested in people.  Is this so special?

Then I remembered the phenomena of talking with political folk out at social events back in Belgium.  Their attention was on their phones, on checking out who else was in the room, and back to whoever they were talking with, and off again, round the room.

I felt like I was swimming with sharks, in some ways.  They were hunting.  Their attention was everywhere and nowhere.

But this sense of dislocation Kellie writes of ... I posted her piece over on Facebook and watched as various friends shared or liked it. 

Yes.  They all knew that feeling.

I haven't returned home, for longer than 5 weeks.  It is something I think about ... how that return would be.  Would a dog, and a beach or a lake somewhere close by ... old friends, and new, be enough. 

I don't know but anyway, I have located this article in a place where I can return to it when needed.

From theWomen I Know and Admire Series - Diny Naus

This beautiful series of images popped up on my Facebook wall this morning and I wrote to the photographer, asking if I might share them.  To put them together in this small montage, some cropping was involved.  Apologies to Diny but the story is more about her than about them.  I want it to be about her way of seeing and being, out there in the world ...

Diny and I met when she attended a photography workshop of mine.  She flew in from Hong Kong.  I arrived from Belgium.  Two New Zealanders, together in Genova.  We wandered and became friends.  It turned out there was so very much to admire about her.

Seeing her series from Beijing this morning made me realise, again, just how lucky I am to have women like her come into my life.  The photographs reminded me of the extraordinary privilege in meeting curious courageous wandering women like her.  There have been so many now.  With their permission, I would like to start sharing their stories, and photographs. 

But Diny ... Introducing her series, she wrote, 'Yesterday snapped this guy who'd managed to find his little piece of peace and quiet in this city of 20 million. I showed him the photo and he insisted I get in the hammock so he could shoot me. I love these interactions. Beijing people are very friendly!

And I thought yes, the people are friendly but you have that sparkle, that curiousity, that courage too!  And her eye ... in a city of 20 million she found this oasis of peace :-)

My client base seems to be made up of women living in countries not their own - but not always, I remember that small group of beautiful Genovese women I once spent the day working with in their city.

Women who are over 40 - but sometimes they're not.  They all have this delightful spark though.  Wise women, old souls who share deeply in the atmosphere that forms when women work together.

Women who are single, or have no dependent children, or women whose children are grown - but then again, sometimes none of this is true either.

My clients are women who are quite fearless and full of curiousity.   They are usually intelligent, wise, and laughter is usually a feature of our time spent together.  As is confusion, frustration and delight.

But sometimes it's all about feeling the fear and doing it anyway ... because they don't want to be fearful anymore.  Fearful of traveling alone, fearful of photographing strangers, of asking permission to photograph those strangers, and most of all, fearful of the techno-speak that has confused so many of us when kind men explain things very very technically.

I have to confess that t took me years to break through and learn the simple equation that is how your camera works.  That's what I share during these workshops, the simple equation via a series of exercises.

And so you can see, the workshops always end up being about more than photography.  With Diny, and so many others, I also get to experience the benefits of their wisdom, knowledge and courage. I meet new heroes and role models. 

I came away from my time with her, admiring so much about her and being able to keep up with her stories of life out here in the world ... it's simply inspirational. 

I have this idea that we need more women like her to write of their lives, share the magic while being honest about the struggles too.  Diny does that for me ... and sometimes, on a sunny Monday she gives me permission to share something of the beauty she found in a Chinese city of 20 million.

Grazie mille, Diny.  For both the use of your photographs, and for your friendship.

Gate-Climbing ...

It began harmlessly enough ... gate-climbing as soon as I worked out the 'how' of it. 

Another memory from long ago, quiet excitement ... a gap in the hedge that surrounded my childhood home.  They closed that up pretty quickly once they realised how I was slipping away.

Me and my trike, then my bike, traveled far and wide ... or as far as my lazy legs would carry me.  Then came the car and that seemed like the best freedom so far, until I flew over to Istanbul.  And zipped off to Rome.  Then ended up in Belgium, discovered France, Holland and every place else in Europe was easily reachable.

'Gate-climbing' on steroids.

Then Genova, Italy.  That place I keep on returning to ... since 2008.  That exquisitely ancient city surrounded by beautiful hills and the sea. 

These days I can wander where ever I want but I keep returning.

I'm flying this week. 

14 days in that city I love ...

Listening to The Sweet Remains these days, specially Ghost in the Orange Blossom Air.

On Gallivanting ...

 

There is nothing wrong with loving the crap out of everything. Negative people find their walls. So never apologize for your enthusiasm. Never. Ever. Never.

Ryan Adams

I read this first thing this morning, pre-breakfast, and thought, yes.   I was reading Amy's blog.

It was a quiet yes.

One of the things I have most consistently done through time  ... and it's dancing for shadows really, is defend the way I live my life.

My ex-father-in-law was an outrageous monster sometimes ... one who made everyone laugh.  He assured me that the more he mocked the more love there was.  Eyes twinkling, he pointed out how much he must care about me.  He could be charming at times.
I can still see him there in the kitchen of 40 Tyne Street in Mosgiel.  He's gone now, that man who was planning on spending his retirement near some beach where he could fish everyday.  But his most serious and real accusation was always his ... have you been off gallivanting AGAIN?
The men I grew amongst were men who believed that a woman's place was there in the home, next to their husbands.  They also believed that a husband's place was right there next to their wives.  Kind of chained together.  And that was a problem for me because I've always wandered.
My first husband gifted me an entire month off interviewing climbers and mountaineers for a book I was writing.  If the authority figures in my young world were telling me I must stay at home, then my husbands have always told me to ignore them and wander anyway.  But maybe they knew that I had to.
'Never apologize for your enthusiasm' was timely.  I have tempered my enthusiasm over time.  It is less evident although still explodes out of me on occasions but the need for flight ...  there are no apologies in me.  If anything, I'm becoming more convinced about the beauty and the need for flight.
There is the goodbye and hello of it all.  You never stop appreciating a partner when you have a little distance sometimes.  But more than that, filled with a compulsion to fix things for people, it's better to give myself a little people-less time.  To live on toast and red wine and stand on the edge of societies I'm not part of ... there's something healing about that.
I do worry that things will collapse while I'm gone but it's so good realise that it's not all about me and that the world does go on when I wander off.  I knew it as the small child who wandered.  Perhaps I was my entire universe back then.  I didn't care so much as the teenager who disappeared with her dog and dreamed dreams that she doesn't recall now.  And I needed it on becoming a wife and a mother.
Negative people find their walls. So never apologize ...  I'll run with that I think.

On wandering ...

‘every journey outside my known world is a form of often painful, sometimes euphoric spiritual growth. I have to break out of the exoskeleton of safety I’m constantly accreting in order to be born into a new world — soft, vulnerable, afraid, eager, porous. I hate it, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.’

Nikki Hardin , an extract from Longing Not To Belong.

I loved these words.  I thought to myself, I know that feeling.  That's how it is for me too.

For awhile, back at my childhood home, there was a gap between the hedge and the wire fence and there I was, that creature you see scaling the wooden gate, slipping out into the incredible world of the school next door.

And I think I remember the mix of fear and curiousity ... the need to wander that made me escape anyway.  A need that still overrides my desire to stay safely inside my known worlds. 

I imagine all kinds of things before I leave.  The night before, there  I am, wondering why I do it ... Cairo, Istanbul, Italy, and America.  But wander I must.

I love leaving.

On the other side of the ohmygodwhat haveIdone pre-departure thinking, is that sigh of happiness as I settle into the airport bus and it leaves.  There is the delight in arriving at Brignole in Genova, of opening the shutters, buying the flowers, and settling into a different life, so full of noise and colour.

And on the other side of leaving there have always been marvellous experiences ... like the market that ran all night just below my balcony in Cairo, or the gypsy festival in Istanbul where I wandered with friends, wandering Flanders Fields with prime ministers and actors.

On the other side of fear is Life in a form that I love.

And I go, knowing that it is entirely likely that I will have times when I sink into the dark pit of despair and anxiety for a few hours, where going outside is impossible, where I am left wondering what the hell it is that pushes me to leave and step off into other worlds.  But I always recover.

Sometimes with a belly-laughter-inducing-Mr-Bean-style story of what happened while I was in that place of fear.

I'm the biggest baby in the world sometimes.  I find myself in situations that are retrospectively hilarious but challenging while in the midst of them.  The ambulance in Genova was sobering but it's a story that can't be told with me giggling throughout.  The heat-seeking missile attack over Singapore is another that comes immediately to mind when reminiscing this stuff.  And the taxi-kidnapping in Cairo was also gut-wrenchingly amusing, and should I ever decide to share it here on the blog ...you might agree.

You see, I was a writer before I took photographs ... or perhaps I thought I was a writer before I decided to become a photographer but then again, I had always been a photographer.  Maybe that means that I am a story-teller because surely both paths lead to the same place in the end.  I live with an Imagination that is as big as the Sun ... at least.

Mostly I have learned to live with that Imagination, to laugh over the stories that (don't really) happen along the way, and to leave anyway ...