I look at it like traveling. But when I think of it, I think of traveling the old way, on feet. Your own feet, or your horse or camel or donkey or elephants feet. Traveling one footstep at a time. I have a whole store of such traveling images in my head. Where did I get them from? Who knows? Books and books and books, probably. Over the years of my life, traveling images always caught my attention. The interest I had in the subject since childhood only grew as I grew up, as I grew older. There are the famous travel stories -- Marco Polo and his uncles journey to China and back, which took nearly three decades. And there was another epic traveler of a century earlier, I believe. He started in North Africa at a young age, joined a caravan traveling to Mecca, camping out in the ruins of mysterious cities in the sand along the way, mingled with the throngs at the river markets in Egypt, served under one of the Mogul Emperors of India (as an abject poet), and then made his way to China -- heading back home in the wake of the Black Death as it swept in an arc across the Middle East and Africa. His was another fascinating, step by step journey the account of which survives to our day. There was an older traveler still -- his journey originated in China -- it was a journey to the west in search of enlightenment, the opposite travel direction we normally think of for enlightenment. He was a Buddhist monk traveling to India along the caravan routes hoping to bring back original Buddhist texts to China. All of these journeys took years, decades, and without their accounts we would know even less than we do know about cities and civilizations of the past -- some of whose names and peoples we still only guess at -- but which stood towering in their day -- many of them beyond the ken of our own familiar holy book in which many of these places are not even alluded to. Then there are the more modern accounts, travel by foot through mysterious places in the Twentieth Century -- Heinrich Harrers Seven Years in Tibet -- being yet another favorite -- in which the author crosses the Himalaya mountains on foot after escaping from an internment camp in India and lives among the Tibetans at a time when few Westerners had... At the top of a lonely mountain pass, weeks out from seeing any human faces, another traveler comes to his fire at night. Food is shared, and as much information as two people can who do not speak the same tongue -- which, if you are not hung up on that, can be a lot -- because to a certain extent all people speak a common language, if not a common tongue. They shared the essentials, a courtesy among travelers: where the next water was, the next food, the next resting place, the next human habitation -- all through the common language that does not depend on words, but on gestures, inflections, expressions, intentions... Intentions alone can be worth a thousand words... This is how I think of love. I think of it as two travelers traveling foot by foot across the earth, meeting at a point in time and space. Will they travel on together? Will they go in their different directions? Either one, or the other, or both. But if they part, should there be any essential information they withhold from the other as to the route theyve traveled on to reach this place? Should they have any less courtesy than strangers meeting at a mountain pass in the loneliest of places, who share a fire together? And who manage to share all the other might need to know as they each proceed on their separate journeys, even without having one word in common? There are ancient customs of courtesy that get lost in the avalanche of information in the modern world, that we can still imagine and draw upon to guide us in our human relations today. What we are doing today really isnt essentially different than what was ever done before: we are born, we go from place to place, we do all the things that people do, and we die. We are travelers, taking our lives step by step -- moment by moment, that is -- no matter what century our journey is in. We should avail ourselves of the wisdom of the past wherever it gives light to guide us by. Under it all, the human journey is a continuum.
Posted on: Fri, 08 Aug 2014 13:10:38 +0000
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