We Are Always Traveling

We are traveling 1,000 miles an hour around the center of the earth. The earth is traveling 67,000 miles an hour around the sun – nineteen miles per second. The sun and its solar system are spiraling around the center of the Milky Way galaxy at 550,000 miles an hour. The Milky Way galaxy is flying away from the center of the universe like everything else since the Big Bang, scattering everything outward in all directions.

            Does it feel like you’re hurtling through space at nineteen miles per second? Of course not. Because we were born on the fly. We’re used to it. This is all we’ve ever known. We were born traveling.

            The best DNA and archeological evidence shows that modern humans, Homo sapiens, walked out of Africa 50,000 - 80,000 years ago. Earlier hominid species existed long before that. In fact, just a few miles from my home in San Diego, definitive evidence of human activity dating back 130,000 years was recently discovered, shattering earlier estimates of humanity’s arrival in the New World by a factor of ten. For our entire evolution, humans were never much good at staying put. That distant horizon is far too alluring.

            As we prepare for our summer excursions, a brief reflection on the philosophy of traveling is in order. Why are we called out from our domestic tranquility to rough it on the road? What lures us toward the unknown? And why, as soon as we get home, do we once again begin dreaming of far off lands? Maybe it’s because we are more at home on the road than we are at home. We have always been traveling.

            Before you step out the door, traveling teaches you its first important lesson. It happens during the process of packing – the art of reducing your material life down to a few bags you can sling over your shoulder and drag behind you. When you wake up at home and get dressed, you have all of your clothes to choose from. On the road, you have only what you can carry. Packing reduces your life down to its essentials – it is an exercise in decisiveness and commitment. You don’t need to choose a specific outfit for every day of travel, but you do need to assemble a small number of things that work well together, and are suitable to the elements. You need to know where you’re going and adapt accordingly. Black tie dinner and the opera house? Rainforest camping? Back-pack train hopping through India? As in life, know yourself, know your environment, and know your cultural context. Make a decision and live with it.

            The best trips, like the best lives, are well-balanced endeavors with just the right amount of planning and the just the right amount of spontaneity. Over-planning turns your trip into a chore, death-marching from one fixed appointment to the next. Under-planning creates even more stress as you squander precious vacation time navigating simple arrangements that could’ve been better handled from home. As in life, failing to plan is planning to fail. But nobody likes a task-master either. Leave open, unstructured days sandwiched between your plane tickets and hotel reservations. You never know. You might find yourself passing through a village that barely earned a mention in the guide book. You walk its cobblestoned streets and stop into an empty café at the end of the day. At a window table, sipping the best espresso you have ever had in your life, watching the alpenglow bathe the rooftops in gold, a wordless recognition passes through you even though you have never been here before. You know you can’t leave. Not yet. Not today. You find a room at the local inn. That night a festival in the town square brings out the entire village. You mingle with the crowd, hearing in their voices and seeing in their eyes something familiar, something true, something real. Among these strangers you feel a warmth and belonging that eludes you back home. The strangeness of the world takes off its mask and reveals its oneness. You can’t plan moments like this. Nor can you seek them. They find you only when you aren’t looking, and only if you leave openings. Mystery and beauty cannot enter where there is no space.

Some of us write travel journals. A lot of us take pictures or videos. These are all wonderful ways to interact with your experiences, mold them into art, or at least record your memories for later enjoyment. But those of us who journal or photograph our travels are well aware of the subtle and insidious effect these processes have on the very experiences they supposedly celebrate and enshrine. I call it the camera effect.

            If you love taking pictures as much as I do, you find yourself constantly scanning the environment for the next shot. Standing in the middle of Yosemite Valley, instead of experiencing Yosemite Valley, you’re obsessed with how to best capture an image of Yosemite Valley. Instead of controlling the camera, the camera controls you.

At their best photography and travel journaling connect us to a place and create lasting works of beauty and value. At their worst they rob of us the very experience we traveled so far to enjoy. As a photographer I’m always cognizant of the light – its direction, its texture, and its impact on color saturation. Atmospheric haze, shadow, and a hundred other variables crowd my mind. I’m always scanning for interesting compositions, angles, and juxtapositions. I’m seeking the emblematic image – something that will capture the entire zeitgeist of a place and time. In other words, I’m enfolded in layer after layer of insulating interpretation – stuck in my head essentially – instead of really truly being here now. Sigh.

            Same with journaling. Often in the midst of an experience I think to myself, this is how I’ll describe this tomorrow morning over coffee when I write my journal entry about this, and standing in the middle of Versailles, I’m lost in a descriptive word-cloud about Versailles. What a shame. Zen Buddhism often reminds us of the dangers of getting lost in abstraction, and how the mediation of thought blankets the immediacy of life with numbing distance. As 17^th century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho so poignantly put it: “Even in Kyoto/Hearing the cuckoo’s cry/I long for Kyoto.”

              The purpose of travel, and of the well-lived life, is to free us of our complacency, rip away our mooring, and cast us adrift into the wonder of it all. Only when we leave the safety of the shore do we experience the immensity of the sea. The sailboat was not made for the harbor.

The Wisdom of Summer

In summer we are drawn upward like ripening corn, feeling ourselves expanding, reaching and unfurling into shapes our winter gestation and springtime birthing only imagined. If winter taught us to wait and spring awakened our possibilities, then summertime calls us in this present moment to fully come into our own. Summer is the season of bright light, deep perspectives and bold realizations.

Come to fruition. Something has been moving in you, rising through you, trying to be born. Now is the time to let it out. Let your plans and projects reach their apex. Pull the trigger. This is your year. All the waiting, withdrawing, nurturing and messiness of birth is behind you. Let your life take its natural shape and proudly proclaim your fullness. The Tao te Ching says that “if you force a project to completion, you ruin what was almost ripe.” But what if it really is ripe? Then let it drop. Allow the natural progression of your life to proceed unhindered. Don’t interfere with the great unfolding. Bear witness to your own fulfillment.

Don’t hide your gifts. Walk out into an apricot orchard. Look how an apricot tree turns the light of the sun and the nourishment of the soil into fragrant golden globes of juicy perfection. Fruit is a gift to be shared, a sweetness distilled from the dark of night and long hot days, a moment of fleeting glory bringing sustenance and delight to a hungry world. Your life is a similar gift the universe gives to itself. As the life-force pours through you it culminates in gifts of love, beauty and service. Hiding your gifts is a crime. They are not yours to hide. Shyness and false humility is an ego disease, a fearful and small-minded form of self-preservation. But all that’s preserved is a pitiable isolation and the deep sorrow of an unrealized life. “What shame,” the Afghan saying goes, “to die like a pomegranate with all one’s seeds still locked inside.” Because finally, the fruit you share bears seeds that will grow, bloom and bear fruit in the lives of others.

Get out. Summer calls us to the great outdoors. Holed up all winter, busy as beavers all spring, summer is the time to walk away from our desks and get out under a wide open sky. For a million years our ancestors lived in forests, savannas, deserts and alpine valleys. It was only yesterday that we invented ceilings and these confounded electric lights. Modern life has insulated us from the very cycles and processes of the natural world that gave birth to us – we have forsaken our mother. That restlessness you feel might be your soul’s longing for home, for we are made – body, mind, heart and soul – from the elements of the natural world. Summer is the time to step back into the primal home of our Pleistocene ancestors. Garden, gather, hunt, fish, camp, wander and wonder at the depth and breadth of our sweet mother earth. Embrace the life and death process by which nature feeds itself in a never-ending array of transformation. Feel the earth beneath your feet. Let a campfire, a ring of trees and a star filled sky be your home.

Unwind. Let the warmth of summer soften the coils of worry and woe that bound you during the long months of winter and spring. Emergence and becoming are naturally stressful and fraught with uncertainty. But now the course is set, the sails are full, whatever will be will be, and the peace of allowance drifts over us like the warm scent of jasmine blossoms. Find a hammock and let a whispering canopy of leaves and a veil of dappled light untie the knots that tangle your heart.

Rest. After the rampant growth of spring, when cells multiplied at a furious pace and expansion trumped every other concern, summer brings a welcome respite. Now it’s time to simply enjoy who we are, where we are and how far we’ve come. Savor the beauty of the world not for what it could be, but for what it is right here, right now. Gather some friends. Share the joys of the table. Waste away an afternoon on the beach. Skip dinner because the sunset is so beautiful, then eat cherry pie and ice cream with the abandon of a twelve year old. Drop your expectations, your tactics, your shoulds and shouldn’ts and simply let the world be what it is today. Take a break from your brilliant plan. Stop being so interested in what you think, and turn your attention instead to anything and everything but you. When we soften our grasp and let it be we enter into a necessary and nourishing time of rest and restoration, a season of Sabbath, a vital shift from human doing to human being. Every wave that crashes slips passively, restfully back into the sea. What made you think you could accomplish more by ceaselessly surging?

Allow joy. When we unwind and move toward restfulness, our eyes, ears and hearts open like pores in the heat of July. Suddenly life gets a little easier and we return to a simplicity our busy mind cannot understand. Old forgotten joys return to us – the perfection of peaches and cream, diving into a cool clear mountain lake, the smell of the grill at the neighborhood block party. It is in these moments we realize that joy is not something we have to strive for. It is not a hard-won prize that lies at the end of a long road of struggle and achievement. Joy is an ever-present mode of consciousness that our busyness and striving smother, like a wet blanket over a fire. When we pull back and rest in the presence of the here and now, joy naturally arises of its own accord. It is not something we create. It is something we allow and perceive when we have the ears to hear, the eyes to see and the heart to feel it. Our job is not the manufacture of joy but the inner work that moves us into receptivity and allowance.

Marvel and wonder. In the end, summer is a time of great miracles and endless magic. There is no limit to the boundless mystery of existence, and in the long warm days of summer this infinite parade goes right through our heart like cupid’s arrow. We fall in love with the messy world just as it is, and we feed on the bounty at our feet. We become again as a child, and gaze in wide wonder at rivers meandering through meadows of columbine in a lingering twilight while in the distance lilting fireflies grace the boughs of the darkening trees, and high above, the stars one by one return to take their rightful place in the order of things. We stand on the shore of a vast ocean. Our toes are barely wet, but we feel in our soul the infinite reach of the cosmos present in every grain of sand. In the loving gaze of our dog, in the kindness of a stranger on the train, in the unearned grace of good fortune, we feel the divinity of a purposeful, meaningful universe – a place where we belong, where each of us teaches, learns and grows in the wisdom of summer.