10 November 2016
It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything for this blog, and I’ll break my quasi-silence by saying this: it’s been a hell of a ride. I will not (and cannot) even try to describe everything I have seen and done, or all the places I have been since I last wrote in Scotland – twenty cities in seven countries over the course of two months would be too much for one post, as well for my mental capacity and writing skills at the moment. I just want to do two things here: reflect on the past nine months of travel, and look ahead to where this journey will continue to take me.
Much simpler than the first option, obviously.
In exactly one week, I will fly from Barcelona to Queenstown, New Zealand. The end of my time in Europe – something that I looked forward to for so long – feels like it marks the end of an era and the beginning of a new stage in my life. In the first post I wrote for this blog, sitting in a tiny bedroom in Auckland, I spoke about how this trip around the world was a dream that came into nebulous being a full five years before it was actually realized; now, it is finally sinking in that it’s coming to a close, sooner and much differently than I could have ever imagined five years or even just one year ago.
What has it all been about, then? What has it all meant? I don’t know how to answer this except by beginning with the details, all the tiny moments that I can feel myself holding onto like a handful of pebbles, tiny and smooth and warm to the touch.
This is what it has been: eating breakfast on a sunny porch in Australia; curling up in wooden house on the river in Bellingen (surrounded by books and soft couches and worn woven rugs and mementos of travel – the type of home I hope to have someday); scrambling up outback granite outcroppings, the feeling of the stone so stubbornly familiar, the same on my skin as it was in California when I was six and eight and thirteen; the long bus ride from Trieste to Florence that looked so much like the Salinas Valley, with its thick fog and tree-lined driveways; the sound of the muezzin calling prayers that I could hear every afternoon from my upstairs room in Mostar.
It’s been the rolling Scottish Highlands and the tartaned warmth of Candacraig House, the pounding of drums and buzz of bagpipes floating up the gravel drive; seeing my mother’s features in the face of a stranger on a train in Italy; the crunch of fallen leaves and huff of warm breath from a horse’s muzzle in the slanted light of an autumn afternoon in Belgium; tired midnight train rides; breathing in the quiet music and chilled air of an early morning car ride to work and being transported through space and time to a different car, with different friends, in different mountains, driving to a different lake – different, but somehow the same, layered over each other in a way that made me realize how space and time are really more like a folded piece of cloth, overlapping and malleable, than any linear thing.
It’s been about the discovery that the world is not so exotic as I once thought it was. Here, too, they have grass! Trees that look like the trees at home! Clouds that look like the clouds at home! Peanut butter, shampoo, trash cans, rivers, park benches, taxis, mountains – these things are everywhere. Places are not so vastly different from each other; in a way, everything has simply echoed everything else in my memory & experience: Hastings reminds me of the Salinas Valley, Scotland reminds me of Otago, Ireland reminds me of the New Zealand’s North Island, Mostar reminds me of Bali, Margaret River reminds me of stormy Big Sur – this world has always been more familiar than I could have imagined before I saw it for myself.
I’ve created my own mental maps, widened the list of places I know intimately – the train station where I met a friend here, the market where I bought figs there, the restaurant with really great burgers over on that street – making the world smaller and larger at the same time. It’s been about the pieces of myself that I picked up and left behind along the way, with the places and people and experiences that touched me the most – little threads of love and friendship that have spread across the globe, holding me steady and keeping me on my feet.
I didn’t know what this year was going be be about before it started. Now, though, I’m starting to think: this whole time, without ever really consciously realizing it myself, this journey has been about finding my way home. I’ve written about it time and again – in Kaiteriteri, in Queenstown, in Western Australia, in Scotland – always with a tinge of surprise, like: wow, here’s this subject again. It’s really been everywhere – every journal entry, every text I send to a friend telling them how much I miss them. It feels a bit like struggling for days to come up with a cohesive thesis for an essay, only to re-read the whole thing at the last minute and realize that the point you were trying to make was right there, hiding in the middle of the page the whole damn time. All of it, this whole year, has been about home: leaving it, finding it, leaving it again, missing it, finding it again in the strangest, tiniest, most unexpected places, realizing that it doesn’t even necessarily need to be a physical thing, finally understanding that it can be many places and people at the same time.
So now I’m going back to New Zealand. I’m going home – or, at least, to one of the places and groups of people in this big wide world that have become a home to me. After next week, my long-term travels are over for now; for the next foreseeable months, I’ll be living and working in one place – paying rent, putting gas in my car, keeping a local library card in my wallet again; all of the everyday things that I’ve so strangely grown to miss while I’ve been living out of a backpack. In short, it’s a major transition.
A few days ago, I spoke with someone very dear to me about the concept of liminality. “Liminality” is usually an anthropological term used to describe the mid-point of any ritual (like a ritual that indicates someone’s passage into adulthood) where the person is not quite where they were before the ritual, but has not yet reached the fully completed post-ritual stage. However, I like to think of liminality as a much broader concept, something that can encompass physical places, states of mind, even the space between natural and supernatural, between our world and the next. As an example: places of movement, where people simply pass through and never fully stop – airports, train stations, highway rest areas, crossroads – are liminal places because of their nebulous character; in these places, one can go in any direction, both literally and metaphorically.
For my purposes here, however, we can think of liminality as simply an “in-between.” When I spoke of liminality a few days ago, it wasn’t in reference to myself at all; now, though, I realize that what I am feeling at this moment – and perhaps my whole experience these past months – is and has been a truly liminal state. It can be an uncomfortable feeling: I know that I cannot go back to exactly who I was or what I was doing before I left California, but what’s next? Since I left home, I have not really known what would await me with each new step, and the same is true now. Beyond the basics (get job, buy car, etc.) I have no idea what my return in New Zealand will bring; similarly, past the general ideas I have of what I want to study and pursue as a career, I don’t know what my return to the U.S. & to my education next year truly has in store for me.
The thing about being in a liminal state, though, is that despite the existential discomfort it is capable of producing, it can be a place of incredible power and possibility – the world (quite literally, in this case) is held at your fingertips. That, thankfully, is what I’m feeling now. If there is anything that this year and this world have taught me, it’s simply to be open. The best things I’ve experienced over these past months have been completely unplanned: I never thought I would go to Queenstown and work as a horse trekking guide there; I never planned on going to Bosnia; I never thought I would stay on an organic farm in rural Northern Thailand, or that I would go to Ireland at all, and I definitely never imagined I would move back to New Zealand at the end of this whole thing. I never knew I would meet any of the people I’ve met, either, but all those whose paths have somehow crossed with mine have become the brightest and dearest joy of this trip. My life is infinitely richer for all the things I’ve experienced that I never expected, and for that reason I am filled with excitement for the upcoming months and for all the months and years that follow. It does feel a bit like standing on a very high place, unable to see the ground – but the air is clear and crisp up here, and I’ve always loved mountains anyways.
For now, I’ll just leave you with this: it’s been a hell of a ride, full of twists and turns and surprises, but sometimes (as Carol Rifka Brunt said) it feels good to take the long way home.
Safe travels, as always, and I’ll see you back in the Southern Hemisphere.
– Sierra
SGBRSH 