Alexandersmap

    Category: Travel

    • The Power Is in the Journey

      If a tree could fly off, it would not suffer the saw.
      The sun hurries all night to be back for morning.
      Salty water rises in the air,
      so the garden will be drenched with fresh rain.

      A drop leaves home,
      enters a certain shell, and becomes a pearl.
      Joseph turns from his weeping father, toward Egypt.
      Remember how that turned out.

      Journeys bring power and love back into you.
      If you cannot go somewhere, move in the passageways of the self.

      They are like shafts of light, always changing,
      and you change when you explore them.
      –– Rumi, The Importance of Setting Out

      Talking with a friend of mine, we discussed the logistics of writing about exploring the world when you aren’t presently out there traveling as much. But we’re all on a journey, aren’t we? Sometimes it’s waterfalls and mountaintops and coastal sunsets, sometimes it’s a poem that draws you into a corner of your soul that hadn’t previously explored. Writing about it every day, you end up blazing a trail you might follow back again someday, or offer to others who want to explore similar territory.

      You notice changes in people when they’ve been on a journey. And you notice changes in yourself as well. Life is the processing of the changes we put ourselves through, the growth we see and feel as we move through the world. This world is beautiful and full of joyful encounters. This world is dark and on the verge of collapsing on itself in environmental disaster, war and plague. What do we do with the truth in both of those realities? We go out and experience it for ourselves, wrestle with what it means to us, and if you’re courageous publish it for the world to learn what you’ve been thinking about.

      Who would want it otherwise?

    • For All That Is Life

      “You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.” ― Jiddu Krishnamurti

      Having a nightcap with friends at a clever book and bar establishment in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, my attention drifted to stacks of books all around me, chess boards and kitschy furniture from another era. This was my kind of place, and one I made note to wander around in again in daylight, when I wasn’t compelled to be polite and focused on our conversation, instead of just drifting off into this newly discovered world of wonder so tantalizingly close. Such is the nature of books—they pull you in when you least expect it.

      It’s not just books. How could it be, really? All that is life is around us, nudging us to pay attention, to immerse ourselves in the moment, to listen and understand, to act and to be a part of, to share and empty ourselves to others that we might fill ourselves up again with new and wonderful bits. Like a tide flowing in and out of a bay, our accumulation and sharing of knowledge keeps our mind fresh and alive.

      We spend a lifetime trying to understand what’s all around us, and yearning for all that ever could be. We are the audience in our own life, but also an active participant in the play. None of this is all that it could ever be, but isn’t it wonderful just the same?

    • January is Waiting

      “I wonder how long it would take you to notice the regular recurrence of the seasons if you were the first man on earth. What would it be like to live in open-ended time broken only by days and nights? You could say, “it’s cold again; it was cold before,” but you couldn’t make the key connection and say, “it was cold this time last year,” because the notion of “year” is precisely the one you lack. Assuming that you hadn’t yet noticed any orderly progression of heavenly bodies, how long would you have to live on earth before you could feel with any assurance that any one particular long period of cold would, in fact, end?” — Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

      Lately I’ve been watching some Lonewolf 902 YouTube videos of winter camping with a hot tent. I’ve done a bit of winter camping in my time, with an old sleeping bag sprinkled with ember burns to prove it, but not recently. I don’t see myself hauling a titanium stove through the woods of New Hampshire and cutting up dead standing timber for firewood anytime soon. But his adventures northeast of me in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island are stirring the imagination once again. It’s time to get back out there.

      You might feel the cold, and might even experience the snow when you stay put in your nest. But you just don’t become a part of the season without being immersed in it. January, by all rites, offers cold, short days. I’ve noticed that I don’t notice as much when I don’t get out in it. Without a dog to walk in the cold night, I don’t watch the celestial dance across the sky. Without gathering my hiking gear and heading north, I don’t feel the sting of winter or the snow blindness of brilliant sun on frigid snow. What fun is January if you aren’t out in it?

      “Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather. ” — John Ruskin

      January is the month when you begin to go stir crazy if you aren’t active enough. The best remedy is right in front of us—bundle up and get your ass out there. The magic of snow and ice and crisp air won’t last for long. You must go to it, prepared, if you want to experience the exhilaration of winter. Melancholy is for those who would shelter indefinitely. Nothing breaks the hold of the winter blues faster than embracing winter. So get out and experience all winter offers! How many more do you expect to have? Appreciate the gift that this season represents.

      January is waiting… but it’s slipping away.

    • By Where We Have Been

      Dove that ventured outside, flying far from the dovecote:
      housed and protected again, one with the day, the night,
      knows what serenity is, for she has felt her wings
      pass through all distance and fear in the course of her wanderings.

      The doves that remained at home, never exposed to loss,
      innocent and secure, cannot know tenderness;
      only the won-back heart can ever be satisfied: free,
      through all it has given up, to rejoice in its mastery.

      Being arches itself over the vast abyss.
      Ah the ball that we dared, that we hurled into infinite space,
      doesn’t it fill our hands differently with its return:
      heavier by the weight of where it has been.
      —Rainder Maria Rilke, Dove that ventured outside

      We wanderers are all chafing to break free. To arc across the abyss once again, and land in places foreign and mysterious, and return again changed by where we have been. We feel the firmness of the ground beneath our feet and celebrate the stability of place. But our blessing and our curse is our longing to fly once again.

      Life changes us all, whether in love or travel or rolling the dice on a career path. Our lives are the arches we build between where we launch from and where we land. But landing someplace doesn’t mean you can’t launch yourself somewhere else, again and again, to see what kind of cathedral you can build for yourself. Who said we are only allowed to fly once?

      “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” ― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      Arches don’t just float in mid-air. You’ve got to build that foundation to properly launch yourself into the abyss if you want to land on solid ground on the other side (let alone return again). It goes without saying that proper financial and logistical planning are necessary if your arch is to cross a big chasm. But small arches are beautiful too, and don’t require more than a bit of courage to fly.

      Assuming we live to be 80, we’ve all burned 2 1/2% of our lives with COVID. How have we spent that time? Hopefully not locked in fear in our homes, but instead getting vaccinated and finding adventure where we may, while we can. If not then, why not now? How far will your next arch span? Where will you land? If you dare?

    • Dancing to Your Own Beat

      “What and how much had I lost by trying to do what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?” – Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

      You know the kind of dancing I avoid the most? The kind where everyone gets up and does the same thing in a coordinated way. The Hussle, the Electric Slide, the Macarena… you get the idea. And it’s not because I’m especially magnificent doing my own dance moves. I’m a Clydesdale dancing amongst Fillies out there. But I find the group participation dances to be a great time to get another drink.

      We dance with the shortness of life, conforming as we must because we’re social beings and dependent on one another to survive and thrive. But why should we fall in line when we can follow our own path? Why do what’s expected of us in this brief spark of independence before we rejoin infinity?

      The more I recognize the chafing between expectations and personal direction, the more I encourage others to break free and dance to their own beat themselves. Not a celebration of reckless behavior (you can’t be swinging around like a wild man on the dance floor), but a nod to find your own rhythm and way of expressing it. We’ve all lost so much time already, haven’t we? Get out there and dance already. But do it in your own way.

    • Silent Companions in the Wind

      Look at the flowers, so faithful to what is earthly,
      to whom we lend fate from the very border of fate.
      And if they are sad about how they must wither and die,
      perhaps it is our vocation to be their regret.

      All Things want to fly. Only we are weighed down by desire,
      caught in ourselves and enthralled with our heaviness.
      Oh what consuming, negative teachers we are
      for them, while eternal childhood fills them with grace.

      If someone were to fall into intimate slumber, and slept
      deeply with Things—: how easily he would come
      to a different day, out of the mutual depth.

      Or perhaps he would stay there; and they would blossom and
      praise
      their newest convert, who now is like one of them,
      all those silent companions in the wind of the meadows.
      — Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 14

      I caught glimpses of the sunrise, spectacular and flamboyant, dancing with clouds and still water, on the train from Boston to New York. I lamented the missed opportunity for an Instagram-worthy photo while stifling the urge to pull out my camera phone to give it an attempt. No picture from an iPhone through dirty chatter-proof glass flying across the landscape at 50 miles per hour was going to capture the magic of the moment. So I let it pass, like so many moments, into memory.

      I don’t come often enough to Rilke, who spun his own magic a century ago. I may visit with him more often this year, hopefully not with the overindulgence I’ve displayed with Mary Oliver poems, but… enough. This is a year for magic and becoming reacquainted with the world. For venturing forth and rekindling our eternal childhood.

      We all want to fly. What holds us back but fear and heaviness? Shouldn’t we reach for the sky and dance with our silent companions in the wind? Fragility doesn’t stop nature, though everything has its time. Knowing this, but choosing not to be paralyzed by it, shouldn’t we all climb out of this mutual depth and make these different days?

    • The Forest Knows

      Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
      Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
      And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
      Must ask permission to know it and be known.
      The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
      I have made this place around you.
      If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
      No two trees are the same to Raven.
      No two branches are the same to Wren.
      If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
      You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
      Where you are. You must let it find you.
      — David Wagoner, Lost

      Walk out into the woods in silence, listening to the trees around you, and you’ll know the truth. Climb up high into the mountains, well above the trees, and hear the whisper in the wind. You’ll hear it up there too. Sail out beyond the sight of land, out where the swells make you feel small and inadequate. Hear the swish of water under the hull, the waves curl and splash away in salty celebration as you see your place in this world. The answers are out there, waiting for you to listen.

      We surround ourselves with the buzz of distraction, the white noise of modern life, to avoid hearing the silent call that urges us to follow. It’s a tempting mistress, this Siren, and drives so many to the rocks of conformity. Fall in line! Do your job! Stay on point! Bide your time!

      Time is irrelevant in the universe. Trees and mountains and the sea don’t mark time, they dance with infinity. Don’t you think, should we be so bold, that we should too?

    • The Incremental Path

      What might we accomplish in our brief time here should we apply ourselves towards it? Is accomplishing itself a worthy pursuit, or is experiencing the better path to walk down? I believe in fully experiencing life, but without setting a course and working diligently towards a calling who are we but sheep waiting to be sheared?

      I wrote about this of reaching for excellence recently, and perhaps write about it too frequently. But a blog is a sorting place of ideas and observations, shared experiences and insights. Since that post, I’ve added some additional habits to the daily accountability list in my pursuit of my own personal brand of Arete. I’m incrementally further along in that time, yet the path to excellence is long. Who says how far down the path I can reach? Does it doesn’t matter as long as we’re progressing down the one that matters most to us?

      Ars longa, vita brevis (Art is long, life is short)

      Don’t look now, but we’re already 2.5% through the year. What was it we wrote down as our resolution for the year? How’s that going for you? Isn’t it fair to ask? Creating that cadence of accountability is the only way to stay on the path. There are few big leaps forward on the journey to excellence, the path is incremental. And what we do next matters more than what we did yesterday.

      Looking back on what I’d set as milestones for this year, I can see that the milestones have mattered in my daily action. Maybe you don’t always feel like brushing your teeth but chances are you do it every day anyway. We know what matters most, but most beat themselves up if they break a streak of working out or don’t lose ten pounds in the first week of a diet. Would you stop brushing your teeth if you missed a day? No! You’d brush them as soon as you got up the next morning! Similarly, getting back on track is all that matters on this incremental path to excellence.

      Even the masters fall short of excellence. Who are we to expect it of ourselves? But when you turn around and see how far you’ve come, you recognize that the path takes you so much further than you’d have come otherwise. And the experiences you have along the way are richer for the pursuit.

    • Layers

      You might say that winter brings simplicity, laying bare and naked the world outside. Living things have two choices in winter; to fatten up and sleep it off or to hunt for food to keep the furnace burning. Hibernate or keep moving. Survival, simplified.

      In warmer climates, or warmer seasons, you might get away with a single layer or even less. When it gets cold you add layers until you reach a level of comfort. Proper layering is an acquired skill, and there’s a special joy that comes with getting out of a warm bed or sleeping bag and scurrying to add enough layers to reach comfort before the lingering warmth dissipates. You essentially trade one cocoon for another.

      Hikers know the layering dance all too well. Start slightly overdressed and begin to shed layers as your core warms. Reach colder, windier summits and the layers come back on again. The layers ebb and flow like the surf as you cool and warm with motion and micro climates. And in this ritual an underlying celebration for each layer as it comes and goes.

      We celebrate the complexity of layers in other ways. A story is always more interesting if there are layers of complexity built into it. Conversation that is simplistic is boring. The most interesting people we meet have many interests, can hang with you on many topics, and raise the bar to a level you seek to clear yourself. You think back on conversations like this and marvel at where they took you.

      Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a warm day with the sun on my skin as much as anyone. But I’m not sure I could live that way all the time. Give me the chill of early morning, or when the sun drops down below the horizon. Give me frosty window panes and seeing your breath in the crisp air. The simplicity of winter is deceptive. There’s more going on than meets the eye. The beauty of the season lies in its layers. It will kill you just as easily as it will awe you with its stark beauty.

      So it goes with life. We go deeper for meaning in our lives, for lives at the surface are shallow and inconsequential. When we wrap ourselves in layers of interests we might thrive in even the coldest of days. A layered life is a resilient life. We’ve all learned the value of that, haven’t we?

    • Postcard From New Hampshire, January 2022

      New Hampshire in winter is an oddity of weather. It’s January and there’s no snow in Southern New Hampshire. Not down in the southern border states. No, not here. You’ve got to go north to find any significant snow. The mountains up north are a winter wonderland while down on the southern border just a few clumps of leftover snow wondering when the party’s going to start. The snowshoes sit forlornly in the garage, wondering when I might fly across snow fields once again. I’d have more luck in Virginia than New Hampshire this winter. Such is the way. The snows will come, later and later each year, but they’ll come… won’t they?

      The morning yesterday was unusually dark. Oppressively dark. Longer than a night should be holding on dark. And then the mist started raining down, ever so lightly, coating everything in a fine film of water that quickly skinned over to ice in the frigid air. Black ice. The most dangerous ice you can deal with around here. It made hard surfaces treacherous in minutes, held on stubbornly against the rock salt cast into it, and finally conceded defeat when the temperatures warmed and the mist turned to a heavier rain. Washing ice into tall tails told by white knuckled drivers.

      Rafters of wild turkey roam naked woods and frozen fields, picking at frozen edibles that only a turkey might love. They flow in and out of the neighborhoods carved into the woods like gobbling brown clouds. In this maddening world of pandemics and political strife, we have turkeys thriving in the new normal. More than I can ever recall marching to the base of feeders while squirrels retreat in consternation.

      The joy in winter lies in the stillness it brings, but also in the changing landscape. There’s still plenty of time this winter for snow. For it’s still only January in New Hampshire. But it feels different this time…

      And then, just when I think there’s no magic in the landscape, the sun rises just enough to catch the ice clinging to the branches and turns the brown into a brilliant kaleidoscope of color. And I see the folly in wishing for something that isn’t here instead of celebrating what the world presents instead. Winter, such as it is, offers wonder should you look for it.