The Nomad's First Steps

I know I said that Alaska was the next stop on this crazy ride.... but in my attempt to make my last post at least minimally cohesive I left out a very important set of happenings... and a shift that happened within me. As I said previously, up until my move to China I had only traveled in foreign places with a guided tour group (with the exception of a week in Mexico with Chris where we stumbled along with minimal Spanish - but Mexico somehow seems less scary, perhaps because of its' proximity???) Even on my arrival in Tibet, there was someone there to meet me and always someone to fall back on for help to figure things out and to travel with around China. I do admit though, in the beginning, there were many times when I felt very alone - one person surrounded by hundreds of thousands who spoke only Chinese.... But as my language skills improved I started traveling more in the countryside on my own. I fumbled my way along for awhile but I found that without any English speakers or guides around to help your language skills improve dramatically by necessity. I found that I LOVED traveling solo because there was never any question of compromise. Whatever I wanted to do is exactly what i did and I never had to worry about another person not being interested in the things I wanted to do or worrying that they were bored and therefore sacrificing my own interests in order to make my traveling partners comfortable. I enjoy traveling WITH people as well, because it is really nice to share experiences with someone and to have another mind there to bounce ideas off of and to help you process the events which are constantly and inevitably changing you. Both ways of travel are excellent and valuable. But the idea of traveling completely alone had previously been out of my frame of reference. I did quite a bit of travel within China while I lived there, but the most important trip was one that was born of a random conversation..... My friend and colleague, Suzanne, a Singaporean girl who was teaching at the same school as me, was at my apartment one day and in boredom we were flipping through a mini travel atlas and got stuck on SE ASIA. She mentioned she had to go to Singapore for a wedding. I mentioned I always wanted to see Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Angkor Wat is between here and there. Why don't we go overland? Thus was born our two month meander through Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Hong Kong. For me it was another first. I had a travel partner but there was no guide and we didn't speak the languages in any of these countries except Hong Kong. We had a vague plan but no set dates except our flight out of Hong Kong in the end. We took trains and buses to the southern border of China and walked across into Vietnam. From there we spent several weeks traveling south to the Mekong Delta then took a boat up the Mekong into Cambodia. After our pilgrimages to Angkor Wat and Tuol Sleng we headed north and took another boat into Laos. We spent several more weeks there and then hopped a train south to Bangkok. I am summarizing greatly as the purpose of this blog is not to tell every detail of my past but to explain how it has changed me. At some point I may post a blog for that trip. Those who have known me since then got to see my emails and photos during that trip....and you can look on my flickr site where eventually all my good photos will be posted. I experienced many amazing things - night spotting for nocturnal critters while walking through the jungle in the middle of the night in pitch black - listening to the jungle wake up at night into a symphony of sound....especially the hollow staccato sound of the centipedes - a sky of endless fireflies in a mesmerizing dance - swimming into caves in Halong Bay - eating cuttlefish - learning to play a mouth harp - seeing a play performed with water puppetry - playing with phosphorescence in the South China Sea - eating pineapple pancakes - getting the worst sunburn of my life - riding in every kind of boat imaginable and then some you haven't got the imagination to think up - visiting a Cao Dai temple - riding motorbike taxis whenever possible - dancing with a serpent - the endless faces on the wall at Tuol Sleng Torture Museum and the monument filled with skulls at the Killing Fields in Phnom Penh - relearning American history from the viewpoint of the people of SE Asia - chasing river dolphins - geckos echoing in the night - the epic grandeur of Angkor Wat and the incredible stone gardens that the jungle tries ever to take back - monkeys playing with my things - riding an elephant through the jungle - an adventure hiking up a waterfall with a multitude of dragonflies, getting caught in a downpour and having to bushwhack our way through the jungle to find our way back - tubing down a river full of zip lines and swings - swimming in a bottomless lagoon - relaxing at our sunning spot in the middle of the river on Don Det - the tree of life - LAO food - kitties everywhere - hiking to the hill tribes - mango sticky rice - riding 3 to a moped with our favorite ladyboy after a burlesque show - the endless treasures to be found on Khao San Road - getting my hair dreaded and beaded - and friends, friends, and more friends who we meet and leave and meet again. I wasn't going to describe it but the memories pour in despite me. My point was this: there was no schedule, no framework, no plan. We woke up in the morning and decided if we wanted to stay or go to a new place. Then we decided where. We did ALL the things we wanted to do. We skimped on housing and food but splurged on jungle adventures and entrance fees. Even so - we ate PLENTY of amazing food. We tried anything new that someone put in front of us. Local food is cheap. We balanced tourist sites that interested us with time in nature and physical expeditions and time spent with local people in their homes. After such a trip, a week long guided tour to some exotic place could never again suffice for me. I was addicted. I was changed. Most of the people I met were traveling for 6 months, a year, or more - all over the world. The person that came back to America and fled immediately to Alaska had all of this very recently pent up inside her as well as all the heartbreak mentioned in the previous post. No wonder I needed to go hide for a while. So I will stop here again, because now it is really time for the episode in Alaska.

Upheaval, Chaos, and Bliss at the Top of the World

Trying to summarize events like these is difficult to say the least. For anyone who has never lived outside the country of their birth for any significant period of time, much of what you will read here will only partly sink in. I can't begin to explain what happens to you, but it is permanent. And everyone who has shared my experience knows exactly what I am talking about. There are several kinds of people who are living in "foreign" countries. One kind is doing their little stint of exploration time before which they fully intend to return to their own country and settle down for their "real" life having fulfilled the expected episode of adventure which makes them a fuller more well rounded person and which allows them to have a good stock of interesting stories to tell their grandchildren by the hearth fire in the end days of their long and peaceful lives. I am not knocking this. For many people this is all the taste they will ever need of the rest of the world. I have met people here in Martha's Vineyard who have never lived anywhere but here and have no desire to ever leave this place. It is not a sentiment I could ever share but I have seen it shining in their eyes as they spoke it so I know it must be possible for such feelings to be true. These period travelers have their time of traveling and then return home to begin building their careers and families. They are comforted and nestled in the culture of their birth and it is heartwarming and welcoming and good and they
are happy to return.
And then there are those of us who go native.
And then there are those of us who go wild all together.... humpty dumpty had a great fall.... and the pieces wont go back together at all.
I'm sorry this is a random and sporadic explanation. When I came back from Tibet to visit after being away from America for 2 years my brother said that I spoke English like a person who had studied it well and knew all the rules but didn't really grok it well. Didn't really understand the nuances and the cultural references and the humor.... My phraseology was off and my sentence structure seemed backwards at times - or just a little bit alien. I got my cadence back quickly -- it is the mark of a true chameleon that it only takes a short time to shapeshift once you have learned that shape well -- but it was something much deeper than language that had been altered.
When you grow up in one place there is a generally accepted and assumed world view that we all agree to share by living in this particular corner of the world. I am not just talking about rules or commandments or religions. Notions of reality are a part of it as well - customs, proprieties, ideas of what is right and what is wrong, of what is real and what is true and what is utterly ridiculous. Living in America my whole life I grew up with all the same beliefs not just that we hold in the United States, but also those held to be generally true in the greater western world -- the so-called "civilized" world.

And then she woke up.

Visiting other worlds than our own.....taking a trip to Prague, vacationing in Bali, going on retreat in Goa, visiting Machu Picchu....these are tastes of flavors in the world that are new and delicious and interesting. But you don't really get it, not even a tiny bit, until you have been there for years. And even then only a little bit. Until you speak their language and can think in it and understand that there are concepts that exist in other cultures which cannot even be expressed in your language because the ideas are so different and alien that there are no words for it. You begin to realize that behaviors which are so normal to you that you notice them as little as your own breathing - are alien and incomprehensible for an entire country who just stares at you in disbelief or confusion. That ideas about freedom which we may hold self-evident and take for granted are very young little fledgling ideas even in the so-called "land of the free" and that they exist because people fought and struggled and died for them. That words like childhood and adulthood, friendship and love, marriage, truth, honesty, medicine, work ethics, family and saving face - may translate literally from one language to the next but that the ideas behind them are not being translated if the assumption behind them is that the meaning is remotely similar. You begin to realize that the foundations of your world which you assumed to be real and truth and incontrovertible because everyone around you agreed with you are being shaken at the core because you have found an entire other world out there who believes that the sky isn't blue as you once believed. And then you find that you can see the sky not blue as well. You can still remember when it was blue, and can drag yourself back to seeing it blue if you must. But in that place it just makes more sense to see it as not blue - because then everything starts to make more sense.

And a part of you steps outside yourself and realizes that all of these rules and mores, social norms and expectations - everything in your entire world that you have ever held true is just one way of looking at the world. And now you have seen another. No better or worse. No judgment. Just another and different way. And then you pan out across the globe and realize how many other worlds there are - how many other world views - how many truths - how many realities and your head starts to spin.

And you learn that while moving through these worlds you wear their reality like a garment, because it aids in communication and acceptance and understanding - but in truth - none of it is real and you are bound by nothing except what is real and true in your own heart.
The divisiveness in this world seems to me to be based largely on the ideas that you are different than me. That my countries ideas are the correct way of thinking and all the outsiders are strange and odd. That my religion, my beliefs are the only valid and correct way and all the others are heretics. But what if you see another way that is completely different and also right. Are they ALL right? Are NONE of them "RIGHT"? Everyone knows in their own heart when they have done something wrong - when they have caused harm. No one needs a set of rules or commandments to teach them what is right or wrong. In fact the rules don't even correctly answer all situations because they don't take relativity into account. They don't allow for extenuating circumstance, but our hearts do - our gut instincts. Now your entire framework for reality and how the pattern of your life should play out has been blasted all to pieces and you find you are floating free and the only thing left that is keeping you tethered is FEAR.

And then somehow you discover that everyone is afraid. The question is : will you let your fear rule you, placate you, coddle you, constrain you, chain you ... so that in the end your life is full of regret. Or will you feel the fear and do it anyway.

And then you look behind you because you wish you could take it back but the door you came through is no bigger than your knee now and there is no way you could possibly fit back through.
It is not a comfortable way to live.
In the literal sense of things : while in China I taught English to students of many ages, ran a small travel agency of Tibetan tour guides with my Tibetan friend and partner, learned to speak Mandarin Chinese passably well, and Amdo Tibetan enough for little conversations. I loved and loved deeply a man who fit my ideal of everything I ever wanted in a partner. Both tough and sweet, rugged and outdoorsy, a singer and a musician and a dancer, a lover of languages who spoke about 9 himself, and a spiritual thinker, a playful generous spirit whose mind was like a child's, always seeing everything as new and exciting and wonderful. And I watched our 2 cultures clash and I watched it tear him apart. I got hassled by the Chinese police for being a foreigner spending time with a Tibetan infidel - since we must obviously be fomenting revolution in our most intimate moments. I got hassled by his Tibetan father who wanted properly traditional Tibetan grandchildren and a demure Tibetan wife for his son who could pour the tea properly when dignitaries came to visit. One who wouldn't taint the women in his family with ideas that were far from subservient. I learned that no matter how much love you both may have - it is not always going to work out. Sometimes there are things more valuable than what you think is your own happiness at stake. And sometimes it is worth making sacrifices to preserve them. And sometimes people cannot be forced to grow but need to do it in their own time. And no one should be blamed for failing to do something which their entire culture has not even allowed the possibility for yet. And sometimes the plan which we see for ourselves as perfect is not really the perfect plan after all - that if only we could see a bit further down the road we might realize that sometimes events which seem tragic and dismal and the negation of all that is good in the world are in fact surmountable and might turn out really excellent in the end. Even more amazing than we could have imagined on our own - because that was another door - one we had not yet stepped through. And that love never dies really. No matter how many million miles and stories and years and experiences get in between.

I remember a time when I used to have the same ideas in my head about how life would be. School....college.... career.... marriage.... kids..... house..... pets... cars... picket fence... I remember my ideas of how relationships were supposed to be. Of how work was supposed to be. Of what a home was supposed to be. Of what SUCCESS was....
I tore all of those apart into pieces and threw away everything that didn't work for me anymore.
This is what China did to me.
This is what I did to China.

When I left America I remember the idea of arriving alone in the Beijing airport was frightening - because it was foreign and I spoke no Chinese. Moving to China was the most frightening thing I had ever done and had taken so much courage to even try. The idea of leaving everything familiar to go out into the complete unknown was terrifying. When I returned to America in the end - after living abroad for nearly 3 years - it would not have occurred to me to be frightened to fly into any airport in the world - whether I spoke the language or not. The idea that there is no real plan and that everything is possible - every little dream I ever had - was firmly in place.

I am sorry if this explanation/summary has turned out a bit preachy in any way. I have to say that China changed me in ways that I am still discovering. As I said before - it is not a comfortable way to live. I love America - there are so many people I love here. So many beautiful places I cherish. I love the open and frank conversations I can have with people here. I love the honesty I can find in people here. The authenticity. The passion. There are places where these things cannot be found. But I don't know if I will ever be comfortable living here again. Not in any permanent way. It's like we all learn the rules to the game as kids. We grow up knowing how to play and some of us get really good at it and become happy and successful within the parameters of the game and love it utterly. Never would want to not be a part of the companionship of the game, the sharing involved in being a part of something that an entire huge group of people can share and understand and know where they stand within the framework and that their lives make a little more sense because of this feeling of security. I know many of these people and sometimes envy them - visit and cherish and live vicariously through them. But somewhere along the way I forgot the rules to the game. I fell off the game board completely. I know the rules I guess but it's like the way I spoke English to my brother with a Tibetan accent. I'm stumbling along trying to play the game because I've learned all the rules but they don't really make sense to me any more. It took me all of one day in Seattle to realize something was irreconcilably different inside.

And I hopped a plane and fled back to Alaska. That place of wildness and beauty, of danger and possibility, that place where keenings must happen, where molting occurs and where rebirthings are the inevitable result of any real experience.
And it is there - in Pelican, Alaska that the next episode of this story takes place.