Quarter Year

Hibiscus Tiger, Bali, Indonesia

by Mike

Nice tiger picture, right? Well, the picture that goes with the quote below was supposed to lead this post, but I just couldn’t bare to put it in plain sight. It’s hidden behind the Not Safe For Work cut.

The following is a quote from Steppenwolf (1929) by Hermann Hesse. There’s this ongoing (semantics-heavy) debate in travel circles about the difference between a “traveler” and a “tourist.” Here’s what I think: nobody with a cell phone is traveling. That’s all I’ll contribute to the debate at this point. Here’s Hesse:

We talked, too, of her nephew and she showed me in a neighboring room his latest hobby, a wireless set. There the industrious young man spent his evenings, fitting together the apparatus, a victim to the charms of wireless, and kneeling on pious knees before the god of applied science whose might had made it possible to discover after thousands of years a fact which every thinker has always known and put to better use than in this recent and very imperfect development. We spoke about this, for the aunt had a slight leaning to piety, and religious topics were not unwelcome to her. I told her that the omnipresence of all forces and facts was well known to ancient India, and that science had merely brought a small fraction of this fact into general use by devising for it, that is, for sound waves, a receiver and transmitter which were still in their first stages and miserably defective. The principal fact known to that ancient knowledge was, I said, the unreality of time. This science had not yet observed. Finally, it would, of course, make this “discovery,” also, and then the inventors would get busy over it. The discovery would be made – and perhaps very soon – that there were floating round us not only the pictures and events of the transient present in the same way that music from Paris or Berlin was now heard in Frankfurt or Zurich, but that all that had ever happened in the past could be registered and brought back likewise. We might well look for the day when, with wires or without, with or without the disturbance of other sounds, we should hear King Solomon speaking, or Walter von der Vogelweide. And all this, I said, just as today was the case with the beginnings of wireless, would be of no more service to man than as an escape from himself and his true aims, and a means of surrounding himself with an ever closer mesh of distractions and useless activities. But instead of embarking on these familiar topics with my customary bitterness and scorn for the times and for science, I made a joke of them; and the aunt smiled, and we sat together for an hour or so and drank our tea with much content.

NSFW

At the Palm Beach, Florida airport on our way back from Colombia.

by Mike

Have you heard of the word, “terroir?” It’s French. Terroir is why champagne can only come from the Champagne region of France. It’s why you can’t call your crappy, molded chicken milk, “Roquefort.”

Terroir is the sum of the environmental conditions in a place. It’s the soil composition, the acidity of rain, the angle of the sun, the height of the hills, local farming techniques and surrounding plant species and all the minute variables that even local farmers might not know. The terroir of the Champagne region can’t be reproduced anywhere else on earth. You want to make champagne? Move to Champagne. But if you’re satisfied making some shitty sparkling wine then you can stay in Fife or wherever you live. Expand!

Some details from a Balinese rice paddy.

by Mike

Bali’s climate is so f-ing perfect that on any day of the year you can see all phases of rice cultivation: sowing, growing, harvesting. We came across this little corner when we were lost and trying to find our way back to Ubud. We knew we wanted to come back, so we made a backwards map as we drove home – Azure took a picture of each corner we turned, then the next day we traced it in reverse.

While I’d always understood presence to mean a sharp focus on – say – your breath as it hits your nose, here it meant paying attention to the area within earshot, which I consider Place. When we look back at photos sometimes I remember, “At that time I was dealing with a window washing issue back home.” or something like that. How strange is it that I’m looking at photos and thinking of a far-away adventure, but at the time of the photo I was thinking about home? It’s one of the struggles of modern travel: leaving home at home, not just in words, but in thoughts and attention as well.

by Mike, because he’s the self-righteous one.

These are three simple things that everyone can do today to live more in the present. (read more)

by Mike

I don’t pay enough attention to a place’s ‘placeness,’ even though we travel so much, and quieting my monologue was powerful in letting me be present on the olive farm in Coaraze.

Here’s what’s there: Water on long grass that wets your shoes; dozens of bird songs from hundreds of birds; dry folds in the hazy valley; clay; upset chickens that sound like monsters; the echoing olive mill with its slick concrete floor; a shovelful of purple olives; sharp kiwi branch cuttings that sliced my arm; the cold and narrow aluminum ladder; greenish shadows of plants against the greenhouse plastic; scurrying spiders; dirt caking rotten tomatoes; the cold that descends when the sun drops behind the mountain at 4:30; honks that work their way up the valley’s tight corners ahead of the bus; barks from dogs down below calling to dogs farther on; the compounding smells of thousands of meals cooked in Marguerite’s kitchen, what became an average smell of food from this valley over 100 years; Claude’s cold fire; the jars and never-finished dishes in Claude’s cold kitchen; the peace of an olive tree in the sun; the strength of a deep-rooted sticker bush…

To know a place takes a while, and it takes attention, presence.

(one more photo)