http://embed.ted.com/talks/pico_iyer_where_is_home.html
In his A Global Soul Pico writes “We travel, some of us, to slip through the curtain of the ordinary, and into the presence of whatever lies just outside our apprehension. I fall through the gratings of the conscious mind and into a place that observes a different kind of logic.” Especially when we Stand and know that we are home. Transcendence… and pure Pico.
Set your dreams where nobody hides
Give your tears to the tide
No time
No time
There is no end, there is no goodbye
Disappear with night
No time
No time
No time
No time
No time
The NY Times Magazine ironically published an article called “The Opiate of Exceptionalism” or why, as I call it, that Americans seem to stick their heads in the sand when it comes to a civic discussion of sticky issues.
Positive thinking and Magical Thinking are two different things however.
As the article says, Carter was a positive thinker but he was crucified for bringing up problems because he thought they could be solved. Then they elected cheery Reagan who knew how to make people feel better about themselves and the country…a maximum magical thinker.
The problem with this is that politicos (aside from being bought off by lobbyists) then don’t have a popular mandate for dealing with the hard issues, eg. the financial system and the deficit, climate change, immigration, the “Drug War, gun control, military budget and continuing wars. None of these issues, were dealt with head on in any of the presidential debates.
People just don’t want to admit that there are serious problems in the U.S. and not only not talk about it but they don’t want to hear about it because it might upset their insular worlds. Candidates learned from Carter’s experience. If they do bring up these negative issues they are labeled “UnAmerican.” It’s called biting off your nose to spite your face.
Iceland, however is a good pragmatic example of taking the bull by the horns and making democracy work for the good of the country.
In the meantime I will sit on my veranda and watch the people in the park…with my music. And later finish packing in anticipation of my next trip to Asia to see my 3 sons.
But before leaving Oregon I will know how to vote and why.
I don’t think I would say that I exactly compartmentalize my life. As they say all politics are local and how we live our lives reflects the truth as we see it around us. So for example, living in Mexico I wouldn’t want to live a rich expat life in a fancy house and sacrifice my solidarity with the people as they struggle against impunity. And I see the value of the beauty in nature in the face of sterility of popular culture.
And as I travel I want to understand the lives of the people I am walking among. I find many parallels between Thailand and Mexico in regard to the accessibility of education for the poor and dispossessed. This informs the way I see my birth country.
So for me it’s a pretty integrated life but with an over-riding propensity for balance and most of all…laughter. As I say at the top of my blog…I travel to see what it reveals about the human heart and what we have become in this world. To look beneath the surface of things to the heart of each day. Does hope exist? Are people still falling in love? Or is everyone buying death as if it were cheap socks at a smoke sale?” I look for clarity. I look for signs of courage…of strength of conviction rooted in heart…in an authentic identity, in myself as well as in others.
I find it in the people on the street who are amazingly able to laugh and play in the face of impunity of their governments and they teach me how to do the same. Knowing they are there…but a kind of giving the finger to the exploiters, users and destroyers.
Upon receiving his Nobel prize for literature, Jose Saramago said:
“As I could not and did not aspire to venture beyond my little plot of cultivated land, all I had left was the possibility of digging down, underneath, towards the roots. My own but also the world’s, if I can be allowed such an immoderate ambition.”
For me, however, I travel to discover what it reveals about the human heart and what we have become in this world. To look beneath the surface of things (dig down) to the heart of each day. Is God alive? Does hope exist? Are people still falling in love? Is everyone buying death as if it were cheap socks at a smoke sale?” To look for clarity. To look for signs of courage…of strength of conviction rooted in heart…in an authentic identity, in myself as well as in others.
You don’t have to travel a lot to get fodder for this kind of introspection. I am still “peeling the onion” of that trip to Europe in 1965…only 20 years after the war where houses still had dirt floors in the French country-side. I couldn’t believe how much young people in the pubs knew about [lived and modern] history in Germany. I discovered I was ignorant. I went home disillusioned with the ostentatiousness and new material successes of Americans after the war and am still dealing with it today even as I benefit from it.
Europe was full of Amerian hitchhikers in those years…many of the guys avoiding the draft. Other young people went on through Iran to Nepal…the Hippie Trail. We all went home to help give birth to a new set of values…for all the good it did.
I think you have to go to a country where the culture and values are entirely different than your own…at least once. Tours will insulate you…protect you…from the very thing you need to experience. And go alone so you are forced to confront and adapt to that culture and discover there is another very valid way to live. That…to me…is exciting.
I needed to go to Viet Nam where we fought the American War and see the abandoned air fields and the acres and acres of headstones in the cemetaries. And to China that Nixon opened up to the world. And S Africa where I saw the 8×8 foot room where Mandela lived for 30 years and where I roamed the hostels where the Apartheid War was fought in the township of Soweto. And Egypt where I later saw the birth of the Arab Spring. Go to Burma and Cuba before they too change.
That is just me. Others may have other reasons for choosing where to travel…or not. Where does your heart tell you you need to go? If there is no strong desire maybe, like Saramago, you can just do all this in your corner of the world. Another valid way to live.
“I felt like I was into a new routine and the constanly changing, spectacular scenery was losing it’s ‘novelty’ or ‘wow’ factor. Somehow the 500th spectacular beach had become the norm.
This said by a guy who had spent a year traveling a few years ago. It got me to thinking.
I think you have to ask yourself why travel again? You spent a year on the road so yes, you know you can do it but I get the feeling it was as a spectator.
The journalist Robert Young Pelton has been publishing a book entitled “World’s Most Dangerous Places.” In the preface he says this:
It helps to look at the big picture when understanding just what might kill you and what won’t. It is the baby boomers’ slow descent into gray hair, brand-name drugs, reading glasses, and a general sense of not quite being as fast as they used to be…. Relax: You’re gonna die. Enjoy life, don’t fear it.
To some, life is the single most precious thing they are given and it’s only natural that they would invest every ounce of their being into making sure that every moment is glorious, productive, and safe. So does “living” mean sitting strapped into our Barca Lounger, medic at hand, 911 autodialer at the ready, carefully watching for low-flying planes?
Living is (partly) about adventure and adventure is about elegantly surfing the tenuous space between lobotomized serenity and splattered-bug terror and still being in enough pieces to share the lessons learned with your grandkids.
But then there are all sorts of other intra-personal reasons that have nothing to do with our expectations of “seeing the sights.” That is the insight that those hair-in-dreads backpackers have. They are growing up. And my couchsurfers who I follow on Facebook after hosting. I don’t care if I see another old building or temple for the rest of my life. It is the lives of the local people I am interested in…people very different than me…not people I “have something in common with.” If I wanted that I would have stayed in the states. I want to “grow up” too.
As for me, the best kind of traveling for Pico Iyer, the travel writer, is when he is searching for something he never finds. “The physical aspect of travel is for me,” he says “the least interesting…what really draws me is the prospect of stepping out of the daylight of everything I know, into the shadows of what I don’t know and may never will. We travel, some of us, to slip through the curtain of the ordinary, and into the presence of whatever lies just outside our apprehension…” he goes on to say. “I fall through the gratings of the conscious mind and into a place that observes a different kind of logic.”
Alaine de Botton, the English travel writer says, If we find poetry in tattered old men weaving home on bicycles, a grateful charm in smiling young country girls… and a shared intimacy in the look of recognition in the eyes of kindred travelers we have found “an alternative to the ease, habits and confinement of the ordinary rooted world.”
introspective reflections revealed by large sublime views and new places may reveal thrilling or disappointing aspects of ourselves here-to-fore hidden from our awareness.
Another travel writer says “it is not necessarily [only] at home that we encounter our true selves. “The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we [think] we are in ordinary life…who may not be who we essentially are,” says the author.
Anyway, I retired in 2002 and traveled for about 5 years and finally moved to Mexico 6 years ago to live…having found an ideal day-to-day living situation. How long are you going to be here, people ask. Oh, until I don’t want to be here anymore, I say.
Long term travel doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Go back home for awhile when your heart tells you to. And get those medical check-ups your health ins. pays for. You don’t have to decide ahead of time whether it will be 6 months at a time or 2 years at a time.
I found that “being on the road” is exciting and full of novelty but every few months I needed “down time” to reflect and integrate my experiences. It could be 2 weeks or a month. Or 2 months depending on the need. Maybe 6 months or a year or more to really get to know the people, get your nose into another culture and try to adapt to it. That’s when you will really find out a lot about yourself.
In short, long term travel helps one to integrate the outer world with one’s inner life.
In my case I kept the house in the states…renting it out to cover mortgage, taxes and a bit more to travel on in addition to my pension…and as a back door in case of chronic health problems down the road. And remember, traveling in so-called “developing countries” will be much less expensive.
Now, I am still traveling and will be starting on another RTW at the end of October for 5 months…Hong Kong to see one son, SE Asia (including Thailand to see another son) and this time Oman before spending nearly a month in Istanbul to get to know “friends” there and as a base for overland travel from there.
I feel soooo much gratitude for having had these years while I still have the energy and physical ability.
Don’t wait…for…what? And keep a travel blog for your family and because you will forget a lot of it until you go back and read later…savoring those memories.
And peeling your onion.
A friend in a Couchsurfing forum observed that when he first moved to Malta he would try jokes, wry observations, and other kinds of humor I was used to back in New Hampshire and Boston. I’d usually receive blank stares, nasty looks, and be ignored. I stopped the jokes, quickly.
Maltese culture has been affected by population packed on small islands, being colonized, and surely other forces unknown to me. My friend Michael, an extremely astute retired sales person, told me that the men here never consciously show weakness – loss of face is a serious thing.
Humor in Malta seems to be heavily into toilet references and slapstick (people slipping/falling, dropping packages, being splashed by cars, etc.). Enjoyment of the misfortune of someone else.
Humor and culture in Ireland has been refreshing for me. People are far more open, smile and talk to strangers, love long well crafted stories that have a clever punchline, and most of all seem to make a high art of slagging.
Slagging took some getting used after a dozen years in the Mediterranean. Slagging is making fun of someone (in a good natured verbal way), give them a bit of a hard time, and welcomes engagement. It promotes verbal, goodhearted interaction.
Slagging in the Med might result in your new car being scratched by a key or maybe even a more severe, dramatic action. Losing face is a major traumatic experience in the Med.
——
I think gender plays a big part too. Women are more geared to sympathy-giving however sincere it may or may not be. And there may be other more arcane reasons too.
I think razzing/slagging is more a male thing in the western world…a safe way of bonding…if there is a common understanding and it isn’t underscoring hostility or used as a way of keeping emotional distance. Which is another story entirely. Heaven forbid that an ordinary western man would admit to sentiment! Although I have met some…and read some…of the most deeply sentimental men. It takes great courage and confidence.
I grew up hearing my father razz his friends and being razzed by them. Then I lived in a house for years with a male spouse and 3 male off-spring and their friends. I was the in-house “straight man.” I soon learned that it was much more fun to join them than to go off sulking…thinking they were making fun of me. And to give it out as good as I got it. A bit of a confession here: Fortunately or unfortunately it has become second nature for me but usually people don’t expect it coming from a woman. So generally I prefer being around men who don’t take everything so deadly serious.
But this only works within cultures, as you say, where it is known and understood what is going on. And it can be absolutely hilarious. To this day I love being around my kids and their friends and listening to the repartee. “Intelligence” may play a part in how quickly a person can pick up on it and think of a “comeback though.
Outside of a culture that does this, though, it can be very dangerous. I had to laugh at my friend’s description of men in Malta!
My husband has a very dry sense of humor and he could say the most outrageous things possible with a totally straight face when we were traveling together. Getting enjoyment, of course, out of watching a shocked face of the person who doesn’t get it and takes him literally. Many times I have wanted to crawl under a chair when they get the feeling they are being made fun of.
This is most common in Asia. It got so tiring of having to take care to “save face.” Which is why I am so simpatico with Mexico and most Latino cultures that place a great value on humility. They can laugh easily at themselves and they are delighted when you tease them and they can tease back. The countries we were in in East Africa were great fun in this regard too. And India was the best of all! Indians can be really funny and they were great fun! Of course these are all generalities.
In the Couchsurfing International Politics group right now we are seeing a lot of sparring between an ardent edgy Iranian female feminist and an irascible male New Yorker neither of whom “get” the other’s sense of humor. Of course the start of it was a self-proclaimed satirical post which bombed because no one there really knew her and took it literally.
But humor is a great way of getting under the skin of another culture…if you survive to tell about it! Ha!
Meltdown: The Men Who Crashed The World
This is a 4 part documentary of the worldwide financial crisis and the inside story that will keep you on the edge of your seat. After watching part 1 click under Meltdown: (part 2) A Global Financial Tsunami, (part 3) Paying The Price and (part 4) After The Fall.
The men who crashed the world – Meltdown – Al Jazeera English.
And if that is not enough there is the earlier film called “Inside Job.”
In short, a comment on Facebook: America’s wealthiest one percent owns 40% of the country’s total wealth. (The bottom 80% owns just 7% — no typo) — America’s wealthiest one percent owns 51% of all of the country’s stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. (The bottom 50% owns just one-half of one percent.) — America’s wealthiest one percent takes in 24% of all the income generated each year. — Between 1923 and 1929, the concentration of wealth at the top of the country’s economic ladder was at the highest point in US history. Then came the Crash and the Depression. For decades afterward, the middle class was dealt into the game at a much greater level. As recently as 1976, America’s wealthiest one percent took in only 9% of the country’s income (again, the current figure is 24%). Time Magazine, hardly an outfit full of liberal kooks, says that the concentration of wealth has again reached 1929 levels. Something is wrong here. To quote a great man: “But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists. We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic nonviolent action, to call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible.”
In response we now have Occupy Wall Street sit-ins all over the U.S. and the world by young people who cannot find jobs in their chosen fields and, in the U.S., are saddled with education loans up the ying yang that they cannot repay. Jobs have been lost. Homes lost.
Statement published by Occupy Wall Street
Occupy Together
I have been glued to the Occupy Wall Street Livestreams worldwide where I am watching “a learning tribe that is trying to BE what it wants the world to grow into.”
What you don’t see going on in the occupations and is so difficult to communicate to the media, mainly because they don’t get it, is the TRANSFORMATION that is going on in the working groups and in the General Assemblies and in the personal interactions. It looks from the outside so diffuse because each individual is connecting into it from where they are personally in their growth and circumstances.
Comment I saw this morning to a controversial CNN YouTube video: F**k the media. Each and every one of them. They’re out there with one objective and that’s to create division between us. Everyone PLEASE stop with this Hippie, Teabagger, Republican, Democrat, Conservative, Liberal name calling classification bullshit! Don’t you fucking get it? None of it matters! All that those monickers do is provide ammo to the shit starters. Were all are in the same boat on this one and we all need to stick together as AMERICANS if were going to get anything done.” Right on! ”
A friend who is participating in Occupy Seattle says: I am trusting the nonviolence to win out.
It’s a process. Not a linear one…but an organic one. They don’t know yet how the movement will change anything. But they for sure know that nothing will change without a change of consciousness of each individual. IMO it will change when there is a critical mass of people that have changed. One by one. Each in his/her own way.
I have been hanging out with a group of young current and former Couchsurfers and volunteers here in Oaxaca (when I am not glued to the Livestreams) who are participating in the same process. Occupy Wall Street is just one manifestation of where these young folks, world-wide, are taking us. With their clear-eyed insight they are edging me out of my old paradigm…out of old categories. We spent all day saturday at a sustainability fair with representatives from 80 communities all over Mexico.
What amazes me the most is the lack of cynicism and the hope and trust they have. They are losing hope of being able to pursue their careers they studied for, so they are looking for other ways to plug into the transformative process. The exchange with them is exhilarating…and yes…they are changing me too.
Some of these young people have just come off a year traveling to 4 countries to live in and study local sustainable projects in India, Tanzania, New Zealand and now Oaxaca. They underwent life-changing experiences (and in one case a near breakdown) as they came to understand that you cannot go into a country to “show them how to do it.” That old liberal do-good paradigm is dying.
But you can empower local people in their own efforts and learn from them new ways like the one in indigenous communities here in Oaxaca called “Uses Y Costumbres” which is a consensus process they use to govern themselves and the Zapatista movement in Chiapas.
The director of the year-long program is here in Oaxaca. Here is an interview with him. He turns Paulo Friere’s educational pedagogy, that has become orthodox in US educational reform movements since the 70’s, on it’s head.
A high school and college friend on Facebook recently told me I have too much time on my hands! hahahahahaha. Can’t think of a better way to spend my retirement than encouraging and affirming all these young people!
JULY 4th
Have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence?
Five signers were captured by the British as traitors, and tortured before they died.
Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned.
Two lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army;
Another had two sons captured.
Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War.
They signed and they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
What kind of men were they?
Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists.
Eleven were merchants,
Nine were farmers and large plantation owners; men of means, well educated
But they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured..
Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his ships swept from the seas by the British Navy. He sold his home and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags.
Thomas McKeam was so hounded by the British that he was forced to move his family almost constantly. He served in the Congress without pay, and his family was kept in hiding. His possessions were taken from him, and poverty was his reward.
Vandals or soldiers looted the properties of Dillery, Hall , Clymer, Walton, Gwinnett, Heyward, Rutledge, and Middleton.
At the battle of Yorktown, Thomas Nelson, Jr ., noted that the British General Cornwallis had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters. He quietly urged General George Washington to open fire. The home was destroyed, and Nelson died bankrupt.
Francis Lewis had his home and properties destroyed. The enemy jailed his wife, and she died within a few months.
John Hart was driven from his wife’s bedside as she was dying; their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste. For more than a year he lived in forests and caves, returning home to find his wife dead and his children vanished.
Comparing being in any country that is not your birth country for 2 weeks and being in a country for an extended period of time is apples and oranges.
It’s not easy. I have been in Mexico for 5 years and still am not fully culturally adapted. Honeymoon, denial, resistance, humor, anger, rejection, acceptance, adaptation all happens at the same time on different levels at different times. There are some things about Mexico I just cannot accept let alone adapt to and probably never will. You probably know what they are. It’s all over the papers north and south. I watched the Mexican documentary Presumed Guilty There is no “system” of justice in Mexico. I am watching this system unroll since the murder of a friend. Four suspects (2 American and 2 Mexican) have been released at the whim of a judge who probably didn’t read the unorganized 6 inch file. I suspect he just hopes the whole thing will go away to avoid an international incident. I get to make the decision whether to accept it or not. But then I get to experience the frustrating consequences of that nonacceptance.
The cultural shock of reentering my birth country has always been the worst because I am reentering a changed person. Living part of the year or every second year in Thailand complicates things. Mexico to the US>US to Thailand>Thailand to US>US to Mexico. Each time my friends may think I have reverted to the PMS stage of my life. It feels like it until I smooth out.
It would be happening in whichever country one chose to live. The most valuable thing the new country is giving their expats is a chance to grow as a person. Anything else is gravy. There is no way a local is going to be able to understand the inner processes of the expat unless they have had a similar experience. We often are blessed with their patience. It may take years to peel back the layers of the onion if we are willing to reflect.
The least of what the locals will be gaining is a chance to learn and practice English. They will have to speak for the rest of it. I can’t speak for them. I just hope it is positive.
Ironically, probably the most difficult feeling is the intolerance we feel when we meet the intolerant because we open up and meet a brick wall. This forces us back in on ourselves. This is when we grow…or not.
Laughingnomad 