Vinn's Journal
4/1/2008 |
When we travel there is a suspension of the outer markers that we use to define ourselves. Gone are the daily reminders that speak to us about who we are and where we have come from. Instead, we are bereft of these worldly assurances: our living space, the street we live on, the grocery store we shop at, the routes to and from work, and our family, and friends. We are nomads wandering the desert and keeping our eye out for any oasis that can quench this thirst of the unfamiliar. Suddenly the dream figures of our childhood become a wall upon which the hanging artwork is lopsided and we look to the sky, the trees, and the wonder of any face that will keep us from screaming in the night air, "Who am I?"
There are many signs and wonders to behold in the room I live in now, the fan overhead still and silent with its naked bulb symbolizes the way I feel each time I leave the apartment to buy coffee or groceries and wander the aisles of Coto miming ways to purchase what becomes the weeks worth of staple. Here in the secret caves of stretching and pulling away old habits that will not serve, I uncover a new skein, a new staple of suppositions. What has this writing to do with now, that the release of fact and proper placement and spelling is being replaced with a flow of free scatting on the instrument of innovation and improvisation. Get the word out, get the word out, tell your story, and tell your story, this is what will save you, and this is what will serve you.
I look to my companion on the road and feel mystery in the making. A plateau of purpose that shouts out to keep traveling and not look back but keep the fingers in the field of force and speak what is happening in this moment. I am not a storyteller, and we are all storytellers. I am a man with a desire to read the tea leaves of human pleasure and pain and identify.
This trip to Buenos Aires is filled with a sound footing both on the Tango floor and in the underground subte. There is no stranger here; there is not the other here. There is one of us doing what we do daily to feel alive: holding the hand of our children as we cross the streets, walking our dog, buying our groceries, meeting and talking story with the owner of the cheese shop. We watch one another with a heart and mind that says, I know you and I am you. I too have things I trust to happen for peace of mind and the adventure of this daily happening, which I label my life.
The book fair across Avenida Santa Fe where Lady L and I embarked on an expedition was met with success eventually as we sauntered down the aisle asking, "tienes El Amante de Lady Chatterley?" We rejoice in our tandem reading of English and Spanish and lust, savoring the words in this romantic language and can't wait to get to the hot parts.
Traveling abroad reminds me of what I experience in the dance. In the dance I find myself in new lands without identifiers of experience pulling me down into that place of convention or predictability. I can have at my disposal a terrain that holds me in the moment, in the gesture, in the shaping and releasing and making of the next movement. I am lost in the freedom of not knowing who I am and do not rely on external events and history, solely, to tell me how to be in this instant.
Likewise in the everyday dance, we are all now in every moment travelers, sojourners of the soul and we make our way through each passing day, and then this life we live becomes a compendium of all the train rides, shopping sprees, family dinners, and vacation rentals that have added up to this wild and wondrous wandering we call our lives. We are writing the travel guide of the ages for our time here, and we tell of the many sites and campgrounds of natural beauty and rushing streams where we wash the mind of its preoccupation to know and to measure and predict and instead open to relaxing in the meadows of memory and story shared.
