Claude shivers in a surprise snowstorm. We had to rush to get all the nets up because if the olives freeze then their oil is ruinedish.
Philippe examines a rifle, one of the pillars of his spiritual life on Corsica. For a goatherd and cheese maker, he and his family live very comfortably.
The neighbor watches the belts that roll the immense stone that crushes olives in the ancient stone mill. The gears used to be turned by water from a diverted stream, but they are now run by motor.
I was editing photos last night in preparation for a project and noticed the similarities among these three.
It was January, the end of the olive season and we had decided to work an olive cycle – from tree to oil – on a family farm in the hills above Nice. Marguerite, the matriarch, lived in the same room in which she was born 89 years before and worked the same trees that her father and his father had planted. Only she and her daughter still lived on the farm, so they asked for help each year when the olive trees needed tending.
The work was slow and peaceful on the terraced hillside overlooking the valley. We’d climb each tree, harvesting branch by branch with long poles, then trim those branches and remove any remaining olives on the ground. We loaded them from the nets into crates, which we carried by hand then sorted at night in the main room of the family home, talking while we sorted in front of the fire. The best of the olives would be cured for salads, the medium quality would be made into tapenade and the imperfect ones, crushed into oil by the ancient stone that Marguerite’s father had hauled up the valley and installed in what is now the regions only remaining stone mill.
Each day, it was the same routine, tree after tree needed to be tended, but we couldn’t have been happier. We were experiencing what happens every year on family on farms all over the region – we were being shown the pace of the olives.
After four glasses of wine, five courses of food and a limoncello, Az and I walked down from the restaurant and slept on the hillside, on the dirt, under a pine tree because you can’t sleep under olive trees (oil from fallen olives stains your clothes).
We slept for about half an hour in the sun, looking down 10km to the Mediterranean. It was so quiet. I thought, while laying there, “Why don’t we sleep on the dirt all the time?” I suspect the older people get the less they sleep in the dirt, but we’ll be different.
A few minutes later we brushed off our clothes and continued down the hill through the olive groves.
Ok, it only took me about 24 hours, but I got it – he looked at me and said, “I’m looking at the sinner.” Before I put all the pieces together I was planning on handing a piece of paper to him with my own personalized message, “I hope for the happiness of my enemies.” But then I figured it out. I had been walking around judging people and then he looked at me and judged me. Then I was going to impotently try to be holy. So I crumpled up the piece of paper and threw it away.
Today I rode the scooter to Castelmola and into the hills behind. Several times I stopped and just looked at the magnificently sculpted landscape – the terraces and farms, the roads like worm tracks in mud. The light was dramatic – it was socked in in Castelmola, so much so I was startled to turn a corner and find the day had gone dark. But as I rode high in the hills behind that tourist town I got so high I reached places where blue sky poked through the drifting clouds and the sun even shone. One dramatic moment had the sun illuminating from behind some ancient-looking trees that grew out of abandoned, feral terraces. It was striking. I didn’t even bring my camera, which was a mistake, though I suppose there will be other pictures.
Another cool moment was cresting a hill and seeing a city in the distance, then realizing it was Gardini Naxos, and that was the sea behind it. What a joy, being surprised by the sea. I coasted down toward it on a broken road, engine off, until the road suddenly went to dirt. As far as I could see down the valley the road was dirt, and cars were driving carefully, so I started the engine and went back where I came from.
On this drive – and this was worth the 30 Euro rental fee – I learned that I simply need to continue ascending, not get stuck in the fog. Pretty clear allegory, thanks.
In one ear I was listening to Thich Nhat Hanh quietly lecture about touching the earth. He said that I am my physical ancestors – in the transmission of their genes I became them. It helped me see again that these places are not separate from the past. The past is not elsewhere, it is here, we are it, the genes of Moses and Jesus and peasants and bakers are not in some distant past, but they’re as close as the next person, and that makes them (and me) holy.
So I went back to the guy in the hood with a new message written on a piece of paper and rolled up.
I walked up to him confidently from the front and dropped a coin in the basket. He reached in his bag and handed me a rolled up piece of paper, and then he smiled wide as I handed him mine. His read, simply, “Perché,” which translates to both “why” and “because.” In mind I wrote, “Keep ascending.”
This whole business of passing paper back and forth reminded me of a short story I wrote in 2003.
An author out of Flagstaff, Az wrote a book called, “A Way to Live” and published it himself. “A Way to Live” made its way to bookstores on the West Coast, particularly because the world was searching for a new Vonnegut. “Kurt’s getting old,” liberals thought, “and we desperately need someone to replace him.”
A young man in Seattle picked up the book out of the self-help section. He had just gotten paid and figured $4.99 was a fair price for direction.
The book was about another young man named Chris, who was directed to grab a piece of lined, white notebook paper.
He did so.
Theodore, the young man in Seattle, did this as well.
He was also directed to grab a writing implement.
Chris chose a pencil in the story, and Theodore chose a red pen in his dining room.
Next Chris was directed to write any message on the paper – something he’d say to god if there were a god and if he were to meet him and if he were a he or spoke a language or cared about his creations.
“Ahem,” thought Chris. “Dear god. Hope you got the letter. No, that’s a song.”
Theo: “Ok, god… why is there so much suffering in this world?”
Chris tried again, “I’m sure you’ve got other prayers to answer and all, but I need some direction in my life right now.”
Theo disagreed with the book, “Why would we ask for direction, will god even respond?”
Chris agreed. “I need to write something that will be more of a command.”
“Or maybe less a command and more a suggestion.”
“to make the world better, to help people change their lives.”
“Ok.” they agreed.
Chris wrote, “Life, please be more rational.”
Theodore wrote, “People should share themselves.”
The book ended with a bunch of tax tables and geological surveys, but Theodore didn’t. He folded the paper into thirds and slid it into an envelope, slapped on a stamp and addressed it to:
“God
North Pole, Canada”
Do they have zip codes in Canada? Probably not important in this case.
To his surprise, the postman accepted the envelope and took it to the processing station.
This was in December, so a postwoman understood the letter to be for Santa and threw it into a pile with the other envelopes that had pictures of reindeers and divorce papers. “On Christmas I’ll be at my dad’s house, since it’s a weekend, so you can deliver my presents there, Santa.” The postwoman’s name, however, was Gloria Orenthal Demeules. “god,” she said. “It’s addressed to G.O.D.”
She wondered if it was someone trying to get in touch with her – one of her neighbor’s cute kids who would send her a personal message out of all those faceless envelopes?… or perhaps the strapping bag boy at QFC was sending her a message… she’d told him about her job going through Santa letters from divorced kids. He knew she was G.O.D. Maybe he was telling her about sex, and how he wanted to do terrible things to her. She hoped.
(needless to say, Theodore was that strapping bag boy, but Gloria never found out she had been right.)
She opened the mail.
“‘People should share themselves’…. Why, that has nothing to do with presents.”
Against post office policy, she took the note home with her and put it on her mantle as the only Christmas card in a lonely season. She wondered about it often. She decided to live by the card that had been sent to her by forces unknown. (Despite her staunch opposition to religion, she came to the conclusion that only Santa could have sent this to her, as a reward for raking through the misguided wishes of divorcees’ children and filtering them out). “More than anything else,” Gloria told her sister, Wendy Althea Demeules, “I’ve been sharing my writing with other people. I mean, I don’t know if I was supposed go out and give charity or whore myself-”
“Oh Dear!” from the other end of the line.
“-but neither of those would have the effect Santa would want. ‘Share yourself’… it’s so… vague.”
Gloria went to poetry slams and read her material to an overly enthusiastic and privately judgemental crowd of white adults and black teens. She felt better. She didnt mind the lonliness anymore – or – perhaps – by sharing her poetry she began to be less lonely. Something like that.
Either way the next month Gloria realized other people could experience the same thing. She could help them change themselves.
She grabbed a red pen and sat down.
She wrote, “Lose some weight.”
She slid it in an envelope, slapped on a stamp and took it to work.
“Dave. I need you to do a favor – deliver this to anyone in the 98112 zip code, just randomly, ok?”
“You got it.”
Needless to say, Dave opened the envelope thinking it was a private message.
“‘Lose some weight’? What the fuck?”
Gloria left work that night in a car whose doors had been discreetly keyed. When she got home she prepared a number of other messages to be sent out – 25 in all. Here’s a few of the ones she wrote:
“People should share themselves.”
“Listen to new music.”
“Light candles tonight.”
“Feast on the rich.”
“Forgive your parents.”
and so on.
At work the next day, she handed a couple out to each postman, asking them to deliver to random mailboxes. Each of the envelopes was addressed to ‘god’.
Privately, all over the city, people read these messages, pondered for a few minutes whether they were asses of a joke or part of a chosen few, then quizzed their mail carriers. The postmen didn’t care to talk, and some even spat at the homeowners.
And so it began: dozens of Seattlites reacted the same way Gloria did – they thought of the letter, then followed the advice. Some thought it was a message from aliens, others thought it was from the postmaster general. Some thought the Chinese had given up on cookies while others were sure that astrologers had given up on newspapers (though cookies and newspapers continued to run fortunes, as far as the Seattlites could tell).
One woman, Elizabeth Liason Frye, got the message, “Drink 8 glasses of water a day”
Hugo Ulysses Goldberg received, “Don’t stand for injustice.”
And about half the people decided to send messages back, addressed to ‘god.’
and so on.
After a few months the media caught on and there was an explosion of letters to ‘god’ with everybody receiving at least one a week, then one every couple days.
By the time June rolled around it had become a morning ritual:
Hugo woke up at 7, ate breakfast while writing his daily suggestion, and tossed it in the mailbox on the way to work. Every day. And every day he received a new message in the mail, “Don’t shop at Fred Meyers,” or “Give yourself a breast exam.”
Hugo’s interactions at work became a reflection of these daily pieces of advice – people felt a lot more comfortable speaking their minds, leaving little slips of paper on their coworkers desks.
“I like the world more now,” Hugo would say. “We can be so much more open with each other.”
Theodore, bagging groceries for Gloria at the QFC, wasn’t liking the world so much.
“I don’t like the world as much anymore,” he would say. “Nobody says anything of value anymore.”
Gloria was a perfect example of this. “Theo,”
“Yes ma’am?”
“Did you know that I started this letter-writing trend?”
Lying bitch, I started it. “No, I didnt’ know that! What was your first message?”
“I said, ‘Lose some weight’, just some good healthy advice.”
Theo was quiet for a couple seconds.
“Ma’am? What if the person it reached was already thin?”
Gloria blinked. “Well, I guess I never thought of that.”
Gloria was 25 pounds overweight and Theo never shared himself with loved ones.
There I was, minding my own business being judgmental about all the other tourists, and I walked past a guy I’d seen a number of times before on the street – he was a street performer, one of those statues that moves when given a coin. He was dressed in a long, baggy robe made of stitched burlap sacks. The hood hung low over his head and eyes. He held a wooden staff and had long hair and a long beard, and I suspected his outfit was a reference to either Jesus or a monk.
I thought to myself, this guy is the most genuine person here. I don’t even look THAT different than the Italians, and they stare at me everywhere I go. “What, you’ve never seen women’s sunglasses before?” Well, he’s even a step beyond me with his long beard and hair, and they aren’t even dreadlocks, which is the standard counter cultural uniform here. So, I had to give this guy credit.
Instead of wasting a couple Euros on gelato I’d give him the coin. Solidarity.
I snuck up beside him, out of sight because I didn’t want any attention. At the moment my coin his his basket he was down in my face, looking straight at me with intense blue eyes no more than a foot away. He said something I didn’t understand, and in his hand he held a slip of paper rolled like a cigarette. I took it, and he straightened up and froze again.
I walked away from him buzzing and excited. I had thought I would be the one giving the gift, but here he made it an exchange. And even better, he gave me a riddle: the paper said something I’m still struggling to translate. It says, “Riguardo al peccato. V.G. XVI” Riguardo means “to look again,” and peccato is “sin,” though I’m not sure of the part of speech…
Tonight I’ll go back and see if I can get any information from him.
It was so fucking great to get back on a scooter today – I went high into the hills at the base of Etna and then coasted back down all the way to the sea. Higher on the mountain the churches and walls and buildings were made of darker stone, probably volcanic rock. It was a charcoal grey and sometimes it looked almost blue. There’s a ring of clouds that’s been obscuring Etna’s peak this week – the whole coast can be sunny and warm then up there it’s dark and brooding.
It was nice to be away from the tourist culture here in Taormina – at places along the drive I could smell the smoke of vocation – farmers burning leaves and branches they had pruned, I could smell olive trees as well. Things I associate with actual place and culture. I didn’t have to strain to interpret life rhythms from pastries. Symbolism can be poverty, anyway. Think of how an adult puts out cookies on Xmas Eve vs what a kid thinks of that act. Symbolic gestures are a skeptic’s nostalgia – we lack enough evidence that we should probably consider our rituals literal. And by pushing together the literal with the unknown we create faith: simultaneously holding contradictory beliefs. Treating gestures as symbols cheapens that power. God I hate tourism.
At some point, as I got more comfortable on the scooter, I could ride up the hill and lean into each curve like I was flying. I stretched out both my arms like wings and leaned over the front of the scooter, putting my face out in the sun. Finally I lifted my body up behind me and was actually flying, eyes closed, arms out.
At 9:30 on Christmas morning I sat in a piazza with bells ringing. Octogenarians wearing black trickled down the narrow side streets toward me – toward the cathedral – for mass. It was sunny this morning, warm in the sun, and the piazza caught my attention from another street because its ground is checkered black and white, so I was drawn to it and I sat on a bench. When the bells finished I decided to follow everyone into the cathedral. The service was bland. It was very cold in there, dark, too. Part of the service was in Latin, and it echoed like you might imagine Latin would echo in a stone cathedral in Castelmola, Sicily.
But this is what I was looking for in an experience – this trip hasn’t exactly been a masterpiece of independent travel so far. I left the farm without a plan and became the kind of backpacker I was 10 years ago – someone who wanders the streets and consumes the product of a culture without seeking to understand the process and spirit of its cultivation. Drinking coffee at a cafe isn’t the same if you’re not on your way to a fishing boat, nor is a nip of liquor if you’re not exhausted on your way home. Buying olive oil gives you no understanding of an olive farmer’s rhythm of life.
So in the cathedral I was happy to participate in my own way (reconciling their religion with my own beliefs by considering them distinct cultural expressions of a more basic spirituality), kneeling and closing my eyes when they knelt and closed their eyes, shaking hands with the people around me, taking my turn closing the door when it was blown open by the wind. People were dressed nice. This is a prosperous town.
It’s almost as if the role of this church service was to remind me of the absoute buzz and energy of life outside, because when I stepped out the sun was hot and bright and the ocean so blue, and I found my way to this courtyard. It overlooks the sea. Old men talked, a bonfire from the night before smoldered, a cafe did steady but relaxed business while it played inoffensive xmas music for the men.
I ducked into the cafe for a cappuccino and an old man stepped up to the counter next to me. I had shaken his hand in church. He pushed a Euro across the counter and the bartender poured a half-cup of espresso and filled the rest with sambuca, then slid the Euro back to the old man, “Merry Christmas.” The guy swallowed his drink without ceremony, then stepped out into the sunshine. I got the bartender’s attention and asked for sambuca in my drink as well.
In the courtyard, in the swirling ash and smoke, a Fiat pulled up that was so small the driver filled a quarter of the car. His golden retriever took up the entire back seat, standing and wagging its tail at the line of old men dressed in black, the dog’s fur pressed against the back window. The driver got out and talked to another man, the dog barked, the driver got back in his car and drove off. We should all be so lucky to become old men in a small European town. I ceremoniously sipped my sambuccino and watched them enjoy each other’s company.
Azure says I need to write more about where I actually am, so here we go: I’m in Taormina, which is a very touristy-for-a-darn-good-reason town that rides a mountain ridge – as if it were on a saddle. East coast of Sicily, almost to the toe of the boot. There are places to hike here, so I’ll do that tomorrow, and probably the following day. For now, a picture of an orange tree. And why not another? You only live once.
At the wwoof house I self-medicated by going outside and peeing in that beautiful spot overlooking that valley and those hills. I have peed in so many gorgeous places over the years, and for that I’m thankful. Peeing is a bit like saying grace – an opportunity to bring your attention to your relationship with the present moment. In college I gauged my drunkenness and how much fun I was having at a party by how I swayed when standing to pee. I only noticed the buzz going through my body when I was stopped and silent for those moments.
If a person from 10,000 years ago (or a Parisian) showed up in our world, they would be confused by how limited we are in where we’re allowed to go to the bathroom. In nature we pee unleashed, we (men) can pee the circumference of a circle for which we’re the focal point, or we can shuffle back and forth in a line, which I supposed we could do at a row of urinals, but I’m sure it’s frowned upon.
Mostly, in nature you can gauge the beauty and be thankful for the waters that feed your body then carry away its waste, the stream that runs through you and back into the ground. I love peeing in beautiful places, it’s one of life’s major pleasures. I’m beginning to suspect that power, life, love and force have their sources in nature and natural places, and that going to nature to get reinvigorated is probably going about the whole thing backwards.
Anyway, think about me next time you pee.
–
* Formerly, Can anyone think of a snappy title for this one?
“There you were, you and your mother, blowing bubbles at the cat, such a barrage of them that the poor beast was beside herself at the glut of opportunity… Some of the bubbles drifted up through the branches, even above the trees. You two were too intent on the cat to see the celestial consequences of your worldly endeavors.”
- John Ames writing to his son in Gilead by Marilynne Robinson.
Back in Caltanissetta, exploring the side streets.
The day is over and the dusk is grey, almost blue, and it shows in the haze that turns the hills into shadows. There’s a warm wind that pulls small clouds across the moon, then over the hills, and I can see where I’m stepping by the moonlight. The sky shines. Tonight, we can see the reflection of the earth’s curve in the sky, and if only we could see around the curve we’d see the past happening right now in front of us, on a hillside. I’m satisfied with the cold and quiet valleys, though, and the smell of the dirt that nourished our olive oil tonight.
I heard gunshots this morning while walking from my room in a separate house to the farm. Because the shots were coming from right behind the restaurant my mind raced. A series of shots went off and I stopped in my tracks and scanned for a shooter. Was my life in danger??
Was it a disgruntled worker who might turn on an accidental witness? A murder-suicide to reach the afterlife? Sniper? Roof? Clear. Open windows? Clear. Maybe I should turn around and go back to my room… but I suppose I’d have to come to the restaurant at some point anyway… Nothing did come of the shots, so I assume they were hunters on an adjacent property. Bo-ring.
There’s a church on the property with a whole wall missing. I asked dude, “How old is this thing?” and he said, “Only three or four hundred years old.” I said, “That’s older than my country!” There are cacti and fennel in the hills. They grow olive trees and peach trees and grape vines, plus they have one of the most fertile gardens I’ve ever seen. Coming out of the garden my boots are caked with mud and I have to scrape them against a wire fence just to walk normally again.
I don’t like this farm much – it’s an agriturismo, which means it’s agricultural tourism, which means it’s a restaurant on a farm that can also be used as a convention space or whatever. I’m not doing any farming, instead I’m mopping (oops! I wrote, “moping.”) – mopping the restaurant and the wine cellar and the kitchen. The wine cellar took us half a day to mop. It’s about the size of a prison courtyard, I imagine. I don’t like that this isn’t an exchange of knowledge and culture, rather it’s an explicit work-for-room-and-board situation. It’s kinda not in the spirit of the whole wwoofing thing.
Today I told the guy that I’ll be leaving early – on Monday – and we proceeded to have a really interesting day. Thirty guests came for lunch, so I got to see the inside of a working Italian restaurant kitchen. The chefs were annoyed that I was there and miming questions and smelling their food while they were trying to concentrate, but whatever. She prepared a pistachio cream pasta sauce that made me black out upon reaching my mouth. When I came to the plate was clean. Good, one less dish to wash.
On my walk back to my room, tonight, I heard bells in the hills around me – so many bells that I thought I should record audio of it. I was absolutely surrounded by sheep or goats or something – it was too dark to see. So I got out my flashlight and shone it into the bushes and occasionally saw a pair of glowing eyes, but couldn’t really make out the animal. Then, ahead on the road, stood an enormous bull. I was in the middle of a herd of cattle. You know the expression, “My blood ran cold?” Well, my blood ran cold, so now I know what that feels like. The only thing I know about bulls is from Hemingway, and he seems to have more respect for bulls than he does for any man (or woman, obviously [not that I’m sexist; he is]), and he writes about their power with grace and poignancy, which at this point I wish I hadn’t read. I was terrified, and it happened so suddenly.
At first I pointed my flashlight at its eyes to maybe intimidate it, but it just started walking toward me. So then I shone it onto some nearby bushes, trying to distract it. Finally, realizing that it was best not to create a situation where there wasn’t one, I turned the flashlight off and I struggled to keep from sprinting/fainting as I walked past the bull to get to my house. My whole body was shaking. The bull stared at me the whole way, chewing menacingly, as cattle do.
So there you go. A day of busy work bracketed by feelings of “should I be afraid for my life right now?” I love traveling.
I stepped off the train from Caltanisseta and realized I’d have to act fast: the train station was shuttered and there were no payphones and all the other passengers were getting in their cars to go. The bus left. I walked toward a car full of old ladies, including a nun.
“Hai telephono?” I wasn’t sure if the noun was correct, but how could it not be? They didn’t seem to understand me, and drove off.
One more car, and apparently she wasn’t going in my direction, so she left too.
I was alone in the middle of nowhere and I didn’t know where I was going. For the first time since I can remember, I really, honestly didn’t know what to do. So I started walking. Read More
I wasn’t sure that I was walking the right direction, but I went the opposite direction of that last car. It was a guess. I figured I might come across a town or a house or a farm, but after about a mile there was no sign I would.
A car was coming down the road. I stuck out my thumb and they stopped.
“Vado a Tudia.” They had never heard of Tudia and kept driving.
I walked on and looked at the hills on either side of the road. Fennel grows like a weed here, and there are cacti with those spiny red fruits. It really is a beautiful place. I was in a good mood anyway.
Another car stopped for me, and the old man had heard of Tudia but was reluctant to give me a ride.
“It’s far,” he might have said.
But then he started clearing the front seat and I crammed in with my bags on my lap and against the windshield. I had been walking the right direction.
He took me as far as his own farm, about five kilometers down the road, and he claimed to not have a telephone or maybe I still didn’t know the right word. As he let me out, he said Tudia was another five or six kilometers from his house, but I suspect he said that to make me think that he’d taken me farther than he had.
I walked another two and stopped at a collection of shuttered buildings. I was hot, so I put my bags at my feet and took off my jacket. I listened to the birds and watched a flock swoop and dive as a group. I heard maybe six different calls from the hills. There was a little wind, and on that wind I thought I might have heard a human voice. I strained to listen… was it just a piece of tin roof in the wind? I cupped my ear… Or… a cow? No… it was definitely the cadence of speech, and it might have been coming from one of the buildings.
I walked up and found a radio blasting from a warehouse and a man sitting in his car outside.
“Hello?” I called out in English, not thinking about it.
He stepped out of the car, a young man with a beard, and smiled
“Dov’e Tudia?”
“Oh, very far,” I think he said in Italian. He described the route, then offered to draw me a map. On the paper he drew a line the length of the page, then it turned left toward the edge, where he put an X.
“Quanti kilometers?” Seven or eight, I think he said.
“Io ho numero telephono, pero non ho telephono. Hai telephono?” I have a phone number, but I don’t have a phone. Do you have a phone? He seemed to follow what I was saying, but just kinda smiled. “Telephono? Telephone? Telephonado?” GODDAMNIT WHAT IS THE WORD?
He wished me luck and I walked back to the road. I did notice that he had been sitting in a car and knew where Tudia was, but wasn’t going to drive me. Not that I expect the generosity, but it told me how far away the town might be.
More walking. I was still in a good mood, though tired. But the situation was all positive: My stomach was full, I had a bag with food and water, I had a sleeping bag and a phone number. Worst case scenario I go back to the dude’s farm and ask to sleep in the barn, and he lets me sleep in the house out of guilt or hospitality. And besides – this island is stunning. I realized that impatience disappears if you’re ok with where you are.
Another car came but passed at a high speed. A guy with a suit and tie. Prick.
But then he turned around.
“Sorry, I wasn’t expecting to see a hitch hiker,” I think he said. I was glad I hadn’t flicked him off or given some other vulgar gesture, like pelvic thrusts or a fake machine gun.
“No problemo, no problemo,” I told him. That may or may not be an expression in Italian.
He knew where Tudia was, and we went to the wrong farm at first, maybe three km past the town. They said there was another farm back in town, so we went there. He totally went out of his way to help me.
As we pulled in another car arrived behind us.
“Are you Mike?”
“Yes! Hello!”
“We were waiting for you at the station in Caltanissetta, where were you?”
by Mike
I was delirious from jet lag as I thought it, but I definitely thought it: “I wonder if these people are my guardian angels.”
Imagine:
Sitting on a bus in a place you’ve never been.
It’s dark and it’s raining hard.
Ten Sicilian men sit on the bus who don’t understand you and you don’t understand them.
You’re going to a town you weren’t planning to go.
You’re not even sure if it’s the right bus or which cardinal direction it’s heading.
You don’t have a place to sleep lined up for that night because plans changed unexpectedly.
From home this is, like, terrifying to a lot of people. Even to me, from home, I’m anxious about this kind of situation. But when I was actually physically there I could trust each person because I could see each face was the fingerprint of a life. There’s really no way to intellectualize it – you just trust people more when you can see them. They become complex, and that allows good personality traits to enter the imagination. People, I believe, are basically good, but from home it’s easy to collapse others into a stereotype, like “mafia” or “terrorist.”
Recognizing I was foreign, the men on the bus were concerned for me. They tried to get me to my train transfer in time, but en route they called and found out the last train had already left. So they called and reserved a room for me at a bed and breakfast near the Caltanissetta train station so that the next morning I could take the first train to Villalba. Oh, and they wouldn’t let me pay for the bus. ”
The proprietor at the bed and breakfast noticed my birthdate: “My son was born on September 29th as well.”
“Really!”
“And you know what?” he continued, “September 29th is Saint Michael’s Day.”
“My name is Michael!” I said.
“Yes, and St. Michael is the patron saint of Caltanissetta!”
“Whoa.” That’s some serious Lost shit. Almost enough to convert me to Catholicism.
In the book I’m reading, “Gilead” by the brilliant Marilyne Robinson, the narrator writes about his practically-perfect grandfather, “These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice because they never give you credit for the effort you’re making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice… Whatever we might say for ourselves, for our reasonableness and our good intentions, we knew they were trivial by his lights, and that made them a little bit trivial by our lights.”
That’s an important result of travel and spirituality – narrowing the gap between what you are and what you want to be. I know I still unintentionally collapse people into stereotypes, but I also know the best way to combat this is to test my beliefs and prove I was wrong.
We love to travel and learn. We like eating and sleeping and going on the internet and we can do all of those things from anywhere in the world. We are originally from Seattle, but no longer stay for the winters. We must leave and see new places and great ways to live. We enjoy living well and seeing how others live well.
Winter of 2010-2011 we were in Europe for a little over a month, then Haiti, then Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan. There was logic to it at the time, don't worry about trying to figure it out. We don't yet know where we're going for winter of '011. Maybe France? Maybe India?
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