Earth
Bound
“I have
never been to Rome. I have never been to Paris, or Greece, or Sweden.
I went once to England, so long ago it seems like the Middle Ages. M.
and I went once to the Far East, Japan and Malaysia and New Zealand
and Indonesia, and I am glad I saw the Southern Cross, but I have not
forgotten how it felt to think I was going to fall off the planet. I
am not a traveler. Not of that sort.”
Mary
Oliver (Upstream, p. 148)
I ran across this diary
entry in Upstream this morning. I can't tell you how happy it made
me! It seems I'm discovering kindred spirits all along the way.
Sometimes, I feel like a freak when it comes to international
travel—everyone I know, including my sons, goes abroad every chance
they get. I have long felt there was some fundamental flaw in my
makeup that I don't yearn to travel; don't harbor a deep, unrequited
desire to see the fiords of Finland, the Sistine Chapel in Rome, or
walk on the Great Wall of China. Finding that Mary Oliver, my hero,
felt the same is equivalent to winning the lottery for me.
My friend, Andy, just
returned from a month in the UK and Ireland. He and his siblings
spent all that time going from one place to another, seeing every
cathedral, castle, ruin and natural wonder on their tourist list.
They went to multiple distilleries and walked on ledges above the
wild Atlantic, while the wind blew and the rain fell and sometimes,
they had to hold onto one another to keep from being blown off their
feet. After two weeks, he was sick and exhausted, sore and stiff from
all the hiking and stair-climbing, and three thousand miles from his
own bed. Doesn't that sound like fun!
I am happy to stand on
the tarmac and wave goodbye to my traveling friends. Give me a good
old road-trip any day. Some of us are made to stay home, and travel
abroad only in books and movies and our own imaginations. I know
there are others out there who feel the same but don't want to say so
for fear of being ostracized by the culture. Just know this: you are
not alone! Some souls are bound to the land, and are content to stay
and grow where they are planted. And that's just fine—especially
since Mary Oliver was one of us! Our patron saint!
In the Spirit,
Jane
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