Travel without moving

Traveling is not merely moving from one currency to the next. One culture, climate, language, architecture to something yet undiscovered and exotic is not the half of it. That is of course a very important aspect of travel, the physical/locational flux that assails and informs our senses is very important. The transAtlantic voyage, the sudden appearance of palm trees, temple ruins and umlauts, these all herald to the traveler an arrival. But above and beyond the physical shift is the transportation of thought.The blossoming of thought-stuff, this marks the real voyage.
Travel is in essence the discovery of a changing mindscape. This is the real voyage, taking place in the infinite space between your ears. Your witnessing presence relates to the the new people, flora, fauna, tastes, sights and paradigms that travel presents en-masse.

Increasingly blasé and bored contemporary minds must move to further and further reaches to achieve the sense that one has moved at all. The sense of newness that sparks an awareness and a relationship with the holy Now is ever more fleeting. From true magnetic North to the glacial expanses of Patagonia, and for an elite few, the zero gravity of upper atmosphere orbit... what is sought at great expense is a new and exciting firing of synapses. A new thought to define the world, to define you.
We take pictures of these environments not so much to remember that place but to capture an image of us in the place. The instant we felt a certain way. Otherwise it’s just more dirt and trees and brick and sea.
This is me... ( on Koh Toa )
This is me... ( in Venice )


Saigon, that place that tickled every brain cell upon arrival, with every frantic sight, sound my personality dazzled to react to the environment. To what degree did the environment react to me? One can never know. On the deepest level I was choosing to be excited about one place (saigon) and not another (america?port orchard? seattle?). Saigon stood irresolute, my mind swirled and spun webs.
After a few months my boredom with Saigon was complete. What changed? My mindset, my mindscape and the young man I image as wandering through it. Like every other place, I had grown accustomed to it and had ceased to perceive myself as engaging in the active adventure of travel. Ridiculous since everyday new and subtle realms of Vietnamese life and culture waited for my notice.
Laying on my stiff rented mattress it hit me, my mind had somewhere along the way stopped flying out like a crazed bird into the great expanse. I realized then that travel is 9/10th mind-stuff and 1/10th physical journey. I grabbed my camera and set out to discover something new, perhaps about Vietnam, more likely about me in Vietnam.
Stepping out your door an adventure begins, even to walk the 5 blocks for a coffee and a loaf of bread. We make ruts in the lonely sidewalks day after day and seek escape from a self made prison. A week here, a moment there, that’s what I need. What is really yearned after is a week as someone else in these places. The person that the thrill and discovery of travel propels. A person under the same moon but worlds different.
We don’t need lengthy flights, visas or cumbersome luggage to travel. The ever present newness of life that we feel while traveling cannot be turned off but it can easily be tuned out.
Wake up.
The breath that is entering your lungs is a new exotic breath that has been breathed by the earth as our atmosphere formed and has swirled for billions of years waiting for you to take it in for a brief moment. The day has the same principals, this moment is an unassailable culmination of all previous moments back unto the Deeps of Time. And each moment after. Have they flew through the impossibilities that coat history to arrive to you; bored and uninterested? Drink water that has coursed in aquifers and rivers and lakes and rode in clouds and fog and seeped through cracks and rained and poured and is now a new drink in your mouth, ready to pass through you and nourish your body.
This is an adventure!
The season is slowly progressing. Leaves fall, done with the business of sunlight for a few months. Perhaps a new stratum of snow settled overnight; each flake an exhalation of geometry hugs close the mystery of complete originality.
This is an adventure.
To be aware of the snow is an adventure. To be able to know snow on a sunny day by drawing it up in your mind is an adventure.
Your body, room, house, street, city, your life is new again and again. When was the last time you traveled through your everyday life? Not as an automaton but as an adventurer, here for a brief time.
Here for a the beauty, not the boredom.
Forget everything you thought you knew about your life and the people that flit about it the edges or warm the center.
You have only scratched the surface.
Get out there and explore. If I see a sense of wonder in your eyes as you wait for a bus or watch a cat cross the street I will know that your life is an adventure.
As fellow travelers on earth I hope your days are long and your nights are warm and mysterious.