Alexandersmap

    Category: Travel

    • The Dew of the Morn

      Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill
      For there the mystical brotherhood
      Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
      And river and stream work out their will;

      And God stands winding His lonely horn,
      And time and the world are ever in flight;
      And love is less kind than the gray twilight
      And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.
      – W.B. Yeats, Into The Twilight

      When you read Yeats you feel the old Druid blood stir within. We know this world, where the sun and moon whisper, and the wood and river and stream work their will upon us. We’re never quite right when we’re too far away.

      We all run calculations in our heads, figuring out our time and where we want to place ourselves next. We run the numbers, and they tell us to get back to what’s important as quickly as possible. The world piles atop you, scorning your hopes and dreams, reminding you of responsibilities and your time earned. Save such folly for another day, the voices say.

      The blood of the ancients beats in our hearts, you and me, and it has a different rhythm than this world at large. It grows restless and impatient with our stories of later and soon enough. What is hope but a deferred dream?

      Time and the world are ever in flight. There’s no catching either, is there? Our hope is in the dawn, when we walk out into the freshness of a new day and seek what’s been calling us all along. But the dew of the morn is drying with the rising sun, and soon our footprints will fade. Seize the moment.

    • The Duck With the Broken Beak

      If there’s a perk to travel, it’s the opportunity to encounter things you would never see in your daily existence. When you pause from your frenzied attempt at getting things done long enough to observe what’s hiding in plain sight around you. On this particular trip, it began with a glimpse of a duck swimming in the pool at the Rosen Plaza Hotel in Orlando.

      It seems this duck that was hit by a car at some point, resulting in a broken beak and an inclination to live a more comfortable life. The story goes that she had a family with some scoundrel mallard and returned with her ducklings in tow. When she became an empty nester she dropped the old mallard for another mate and now spends her days swimming in the hotel pool and walking amongst the guests looking for handouts.

      At some point in her evening she flies away to spend the night elsewhere, but returns in the warmth of the day to take up her role as ducky ambassador for another day. The hotel employees are familiar with her routine and don’t blink an eye when she walks around looking for stray bits to eat. The novelty is still with the guests, as we encounter this unusual pool duck in our own time. She seems to relish every encounter, and poses for pictures as she’s no doubt done a thousand times before.

      The broken beak is her unique feature, and no doubt caused her great discomfort when she had her accident. But she wears her scars proudly, showing the world that this duck is a survivor. Humans could learn a thing or two from her. Wear your scars proudly, treat everyone with respect and don’t put up with characters who don’t measure up to your standards.

      These encounters are where the joy of travel resides. We move through our time and this world, chancing on these moments with a life force here and there that makes us stop in wonder. I’ll continue my journey, likely never back in this place again. But I’ll remember this scarred, friendly ambassador, poolside with her court.

    • Hearing Our Music

      “Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
      – Friedrich Nietzsche

      When is it easiest to hear your own music? When it’s quiet, of course. When you pull yourself away from the madness of the world, find the stillness and listen.

      When it is easiest to hear the music that others are dancing to? When you break bread together, gather around and listen. And after the last couple of years you’ll hear all sorts of things.

      Being out amongst the masses again, seeing many old familiar faces that have weathered differently in the storms of the last few years, prompts reflection on how I’m weathering the storm myself. You see quickly who has struggled, who has pivoted to find a different side of themselves, who has stuck to old beliefs or abruptly changed to new ones, and who has opted out entirely. And you see yourself in each of them.

      This is a particularly noisy week, at an industry event full of people with diverse opinions, stemming from equally diverse backgrounds, information sources and social reinforcement. In this environment you hear some of the music that others are dancing to, even if you don’t always find it dance-worthy yourself. I think the important thing is to hear their music anyway.

      And then reflect on what you’re currently dancing to. You might like it more. Or maybe less. But either way you’ll hear it differently.

    • Modern Travel

      “Modern traveling is not traveling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.” – John Ruskin

      I smiled to myself when I thought of this quote, by a man who died in 1900, as I folded myself into a coach seat in a plane full of business travelers and tourists alike. The more things change the more they stay the same. John Ruskin was likely shipping himself by train or steamer in his latter years, by stagecoach or tall ship in his younger years. And we delight in the same observation: travel can be uncomfortable and tedious. But it can also be adventurous.

      When you travel for work on a weekend you tend to let your guard down a bit and dress a little more casually, while keeping in mind the logistics of packing light. It wasn’t lost on me (or Ruskin well before me) that packing a bag and yourself is very much the same as packing a box for shipment. Weight and size matter a lot in both situations, and you must be creative and make sacrifices.

      This business of traveling can be more comfortable, more luxurious, and a lot less stressful if you just throw enough money at it. We all prioritize what we spend money on a bit differently, and some would use theirs to upgrade to first class or take a private flight. I wish them well, even as I dismiss the very idea of ever spending that kind of money for something as basic as travel. If money is a story we all agree to tell ourselves, my story doesn’t include frivolous spending on shipping myself to places.

      Still, I heard from a friend who recently took his company’s private jet from Boston to Toronto for a brief meeting and then back again. In the time most of us would take to get to the airport and suffer through the indignities the airlines and your fellow passengers put you through he was there and back with casual, strategic conversation the entire way. Maybe there’s a place for this kind of modern travel after all.

      I think the answer, for the rest of us, is to stop treating ourselves like parcels and slow down the process of getting from point A to point B. Take a sleeper train across the country, meander across the most interesting terrain in an RV or van, sail from here to there in the company of fascinating people. Any of these is less efficient but far more enjoyable than most modern travel. For it’s fair to ask; we aren’t FedEx packages, are we?

    • From Scratch, Daily

      Every morning I glance at a blank page and begin to write from scratch. I’m sure your own writing process is different in many ways, but for me the act of beginning to type is a signal to the brain to get to it already. Often I’ll delete entire paragraphs that ultimately don’t make the cut, but Stephen King told us to kill our babies, didn’t he?

      That last paragraph may ultimately disappear into bits and bytes of what might have been. This one too, may pay the ultimate price for being in the early stages of a thought. Or maybe not, should I be so bold as to believe an idea is worth putting out there as it is when it dances off the fingertips. Time will tell.

      The easiest blog posts to write are about places I’ve been to or things I’ve experienced. The hardest are about things I process in my brain in the early morning hours as I contemplate whatever ideas I’m toying with at the moment. But isn’t that the way conversation works too? We enthusiastically jump into conversation about things we’ve experienced, but are more reluctant to dip a toe into deep philosophical or abstract waters. Want to ice the waters even more? Make it deeply personal.

      This blog about places I visit in the northeast corner of North America evolved into a deeper dive into waters I didn’t expect to swim in. But a blog is meant to evolve as its writer does, and this writer is ever-so-slowly evolving into something better than the person who started writing it. One book or one experience leads to another, which opens the mind to new ideas, which end up in the blog when they’ve properly steeped in the brain for a time. That’s life, isn’t it? A bunch of people figuring things out lumped together and occasionally bumping into each other.

      The easiest path to a blog post is to drop in a quote or poem that inspires deeper exploration. I use this frequently, and have a stack of drafts awaiting further exploration. Likewise, I revisit highlighted passages on the Kindle or pull old favorite books off the shelf now and then to flesh out a thought that sits in limbo a beat too long. Like that conversation you have in a coffee shop or on a quiet walk, contribution from others opens up new ideas in your own mind.

      A blog ends up being a mostly one-sided conversation, as one person figures things out in this strange and complicated world we live in. But nothing is more complicated than the human brain, reacting and adapting to the changes, both within and without. We’re all a work in progress, and a blog offers you the chance to place it out there for all to see. I wish a few more people I know would start writing their own.

      Until tomorrow….

    • A Visit with Andrew Carnegie

      “The man who dies rich dies in disgrace.” – Andrew Carnegie

      Andrew Carnegie was born into poverty, turned steel into gold and then gave away 90% of his fortune in the last 18 years of his life. Of all the places in the world he could spend eternity, he chose the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. I wonder at such things – why here? Why not his beloved Scotland? Why not Lenox, Massachusetts, where he spent his last couple of years? The only way to know is to visit the place.

      Walking around you realize that Sleepy Hollow is a beautiful spot, and likely was peaceful once, before cars and sirens and encroaching development squeezed the solitude right out of the place. But deep in the heart of the cemetery, way up on the hill, you find it grows relatively still, even now. And this is where you’ll find Carnegie.

      Looking around at the grand celebrations of wealth displayed in death at Sleepy Hollow (You see? I mattered!) I was struck by the simple and beautiful Celtic Cross gravestone rising amongst the trees at Andrew Carnegie’s burial plot. Granite ledge behind him and a gentle sloping hill in front. Peace.

      Wealth bought him elbow room in death, and wisdom guided him to use it in the most simple, dignified way. I should think he made a point of being placed at arms length from the wealthy posers of the day. He was especially good at calling them out for what they were:

      “There is no class as pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.”

      I’m not particularly interested in being buried in one spot. I think I’d rather have my ashes scattered to the winds and sea – to be an eternal traveller in this world. But I see the value of having a place where people can visit you, as I visited Carnegie this week.

      Carnegie became larger than life when he gave away his fortune before death. That Celtic Cross serves as a compass in his absence, pointing the way for the generations who followed him. Quietly reminding us to do enough in our life that others might want to invest a bit of their own brief lives to visit you long after your gone.

      Simplicity and elbow room at Andrew Carnegie’s final resting place.

    • Visiting a Legend in Sleepy Hollow

      “To look upon its grass grown yard, where the sunbeams seem to sleep so quietly, one would think that there at least the dead might rest in peace.” – Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

      There are two Sleepy Hollow Cemeteries of note. There’s the one up in Concord, Massachusetts with it’s Author’s Ridge populated with the bones of Thoreau, Emerson, Alcott and others. And then there’s the one here on the shores of the Hudson River, where the wealthy vacated the city for one last time and tried to one-up each other in death with grand mausoleums as their final statement about how rich and powerful they were.

      Those rich folks can wait in their eternity. For there’s really only one name that matters when you talk about Sleepy Hollow, the guy who put it on the map: Washington Irving. Irving wrote two of the most familiar short stories in our cultural memory: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle.

      It’s that tale of the headless horseman that inspires people to visit his grave at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Irving is buried in the oldest section of the graveyard, with unpaved roads crisscrossing un-mowed plots with headstones protruding up in neat columns. That walk up the hill to visit his grave seemed perfect. Like walking back in time to visit those who came before us.

      I didn’t visit out of some ghoulish fascination with his short story, but for the whispers you hear at their resting place. Cemeteries generally hold the lay of the land as it was on the day they buried someone, and Irving’s resting place nestled amongst his family on a hill overlooking the Hudson River Valley seems a lovely place to spend eternity.

      Of course, Irving doesn’t need to whisper, for he wrote plenty for us to draw on. His stories will likely outlast every gravestone in Sleepy Hollow. Does that make him a legend?

    • Diner Talk

      Everyone thinks of travel as exotic, and business travel as bordering on gluttonous. Well, let me shatter those illusions. This evening I’m staying in a dumpy Hampton Inn with a privacy lock that appears to have borne the brunt of a few too many kicks to the door. If there’s anything good about seeing that, it was quickly forgetting about the mildew smell that greeted me as I opened the door. But hey, the hotel sneaks just under the maximum rate for this particular corner of the world.

      On the plus side, I got to experience the natives in the wild. By wild, I mean I went to a New York diner (open 24 hours!) and listened to the father and mother conversation at the table closest to me. Ever wonder if people talk like George and Jerry on Seinfeld when they’re at the diner? I’m here to tell you they hit the mark.

      The son (more George than Jerry) did almost all the talking, with Mom playing the dutiful part of good listener. Talk ran from the state of the New York Yankees and reminiscing about the good old days of George Steinbrenner to a new car this poor guy purchased two weeks prior that clearly didn’t measure up to expectations. But mostly it was an overall appreciation for the amazing onion rings he crunched on between Yankee and car talk. After all, this was a New York diner, and food is a big deal here. The menu runs heavy and varied, while the bar menu runs comparatively light (5 choices of mainstream beer, and a choice of 5 mixed drinks, featuring a classic hit, the White Russian). But people don’t go to diners to pound drinks, they go fill their bellies and talk about the state of the world.

      Now don’t get me wrong, I didn’t go to this diner to eavesdrop, but the sheer enthusiasm expressed for the range of topics made it impossible to focus on reading the latest book on the Kindle app. Sometimes you’ve got to savor the moment as it’s presented to you. I might be a few chapters behind pace in finishing that book, but my gosh I soaked up some unadulterated New York diner talk. And realized in the process that I’ve missed these moments of travelling bliss more than I dared believe.

      By comparison, they probably thought my table pretty boring.

    • Let Us Go Forth

      “What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks? Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.” – W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore

      There is still a schemer in you and me, plotting escapes to faraway places and magical hidden nooks closer to home. There are still stories percolating in our heads, looking to escape into the world in mischievous stacks of words. For everything exists, and we do too for such a short time as this. We must explore it with the urgency that this brief life demands.

      We’ve all learned a hard lesson the last few years. The world isn’t fair, doesn’t care about your hopes and dreams, and far too many people believe whatever Machiavellian story someone else is spinning for them. Is there not worthier magic in this world that needs expression? We must explore the physical world, and swim the sparkling waters of the ethereal within our imagination while there’s still time.

      Have the mettle to rise above the dismal din. Fly, while we may, for the world is only a little dust under our feet. Go forth and bring its wonder back for all to see.

    • Becoming Equal to the Whole

      “The problem with most people, he felt, is that they build artificial walls around subjects and ideas. The real thinker sees the connections, grasps the essence of the life force operating in every individual instance. Why should any individual stop at poetry, or find art unrelated to science, or narrow his or her intellectual interests? The mind was designed to connect things, like a loom that knits together all of the threads of a fabric. If life exists as an organic whole and cannot be separated into parts without losing a sense of the whole, then thinking should make itself equal to the whole.” – Robert Greene, describing Goethe, Mastery

      This idea of making yourself equal to the whole through exploring all available interests, normally gets you tagged as unfocused or a Jack-of-all-trades (master of none). Such expansive thinking is regarded as inefficient by many. But let’s face it, the people with a wide range of interests are able to transcend the ordinary and create things that others might not see. They become visionaries.

      We’re all just connecting the dots, trying to make sense of the world and our place in it. We are a part of that sum, and it’s okay to question what that part might be. What’s certain is that it’s our part, nobody else’s, and we ought to find a path that makes the most sense for ourselves. Everything we do, every pursuit, every relationship, every stumble along the way is a part of becoming whatever it is we’ll title the sum of our lifetime. That process of becoming is what life is all about.

      Surely, we can never really equal the whole, but we can get pretty far down the path. And that’s about all you can hope for in one lifetime, isn’t it? To pursue our diverse interests as far as we can take them, and to contribute something back to those following their own paths towards that elusive whole. That’s what Goethe did, and Robert Greene is doing. Shouldn’t we too?