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@@ -1,10 +1,8 @@ -Traveling around for months or years on end without any direction sounds romantic, at least to some people, and it is. For a while. +It's difficult to describe the sense of freedom that comes from traveling through the world, unleashed from all the responsibility or worry of normal suburban/urban life in 21st century America. The perpetual motion of open-ended travel is liberating in a way that few other things can really match. -It's difficult to describe the sense of freedom you feel traveling through the world, unleashed from all responsibility or worry. The perpetual motion of open ended travel is liberating in a way that nothing else I'm aware of is, save perhaps psychedelics. +Traveling long term is also a kind of curse though. Don't forget that exile was once a favorite punishment for all sorts of crimes in more than a few cultures. Cain, perhaps western culture's most famous criminal, was condemned to wander the earth aimlessly as a punishment for murdering his brother. The worst thing his culture could conceive of was to strip him of a home and set him adrift in the world. -Traveling long term like this is also a kind of curse though. Don't forget that exile was once a favorite punishment for all sorts of crimes in more than a few cultures. Cain, perhaps western culture's most famous criminal, was condemned to wander the earth aimlessly as a punishment for murdering his brother. The worst thing his culture could concieve of was to strip him of purpose and set him adrift in the world. - -I think there's an important lesson there for traveling. Long term travel that has no sense of purpose, no mission, no project behind it inevitably leaves you lost, adrift in the world, wandering aimlessly, trapped in a pit of ennui. +I think there's an important lesson there for travelers. Long term travel that has no sense of purpose, no mission, no project behind it inevitably leaves you lost, adrift in the world, wandering aimlessly, trapped in a pit of ennui. Do it too long and you'll find that ennui, no matter who you are. It is too easy to let your brain slip into a mindless blur of cocktails and sunsets that leave your mind limp as a lime floating in yesterday's beer. It's okay to do that for a while, but too long and you'll throw in the towel or turn to one of those sad, soused expats staring blankly at the wall behind the bar all day. @@ -12,44 +10,33 @@ If you want to do more than just travel for a bit, if you want to make a life on The first thing you need is a project, a purpose to drive you, no matter how quixotic or strange it might be. Almost every long term traveler I know has something that drives them. Often these projects are the reason I know of them. I know people who [make movies](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCirYAT7CafNatSyJH3-O4pQ), many [others](https://www.bumfuzzle.com/) [who write](https://www.vagabondjourney.com/), others who [photograph](http://charlenewinfred.com/journal/), others who [paint](https://expeditionaryart.com/blog/), others who are [avid birdwatchers](https://www.notesfromtheroad.com/), others who take work along the way, traveling chefs, traveling teachers, archaeologists -- anyone who travels for an extended period of time has something driving them, even if it's nothing more than a desire to show their children the world. -For me it's usually several things, but the obvious public one is this website. I have been writing for this site more or less steadily since 2003. I've managed to put down over 260,000 words here, most of which I can even re-read without wanting to punch myself in the face, which is more than I can say for most of the writing I've been paid to do. I don't have a real reason for doing any of this beyond the fact that it's an neverending project that I enjoy and that gives a certain sense of purpose to my days on the road. I don’t make luxagraf because I travel, I also travel because I make luxagraf. The two go hand in hand, they are in fact very much the same project. - -But sometimes even luxagraf isn't enough to stave off the sense of being adrift. I can always tell when ennui has set in for me: I look back at luxagraf. Posts will get progressively shorter, terser, heavier on the photos and generally mundane. I'm just going through the motions and I can tell. I'm sure you can too dear reader. - -To make our recent bout of ennui more acute, in the last ten days or so we've all had the flu. In five years we've never been simultaneously sick. It's a pretty awful flu, high fevers, chills, all night coughs and general misery. It was also the sort of flu that makes it impossible to read, which meant I spent at fair portion of time contorted in strange positions in the back of the bus, with two clammy feverish five-years-olds pressed tightly against me, just staring up at the ceiling in the dark. It was the kind of flu that strips away your existence and forces you to ask, what is the point of what I'm doing right now? And what am I doing right now anyway? +For me it's usually several things, but the obvious public one is this website. I have been writing for this site more or less steadily since 2003. I've managed to put down over 280,000 words here, most of which I can even re-read without wanting to punch myself in the face, which is more than I can say for most of the writing I've been paid to do. -If you're one of the half dozen friends and family we've talked to in the past couple of months you've probably heard us say we were headed everywhere from Mexico to Canada because the truth is for a while now we've had no real plan, no project, no purpose driving us. We're all feeling a little bit lost, a bit bored with most of the ideas we've come up with. The get up and go got up and went at some point and we need to get it back. +I don't have a real reason for doing any of this beyond the fact that it's an neverending project that I enjoy and that gives a certain sense of purpose to my days on the road. I don’t make luxagraf because I travel, I also travel because I make luxagraf. The two go hand in hand, they are in fact very much the same project. -To fix this we need to tap into the second thing you need for a successful and happy life on the road. This one is a little nebulous, but I like to define it as an acute sense of place and your place in places. +The second thing you need for a successful and happy life on the road is a little more nebulous, but I like to define it as an acute sense of place and your place in places. -You have to make sure you're in places that move your soul, places that fill the spiritual hunger inside you that sent you traveling in the first place. The point to existence isn't to accumulate stuff you know (and places can be stuff just as much as stuff can be stuff) the point to existence to fully develop who you are. To make that task easier it realy helps to be in places you love. +You have to make sure you're in places that move your soul, places that fill the spiritual hunger inside you that sent you traveling in the first place. The point to existence isn't to accumulate stuff you know (and places can be stuff just as much as stuff can be stuff) the point to existence is to fully develop who you are. To make that task easier it really helps to be in places you love. -But I don't just mean places you love in the sense that pretty much everyone loves the beach. I mean places that you go to and you immediately feel at home there for whatever reason you can't really put your finger on. I believe this is actually a sense you can develop, the ability to feel what once might have been called the vibe of a place. I don't know whether that energy is a result of human experience in a place, some kind of inate energy of a place, some sort of being that occupies a place or, most likely, some combination of all those things. I can't explain how you tap into it, I just know that you can and once you know how you'll be well on your way to making your travels a much more enjoyable experience. +But I don't just mean places you love in the sense that pretty much everyone loves the beach. I mean places that you go to and you immediately feel at home there for whatever reason you can't really put your finger on. I believe this is actually a sense you can develop, the ability to feel what once might have been called the vibe of a place. I don't know whether that energy is a result of human experience in a place, some kind of innate energy of a place, some sort of being that occupies a place or, most likely, some combination of all those things. -Of course sometimes you end up in places where you are not happy for one reason or another and you can't leave them. That's when traveling gets hard and people end up throwing in the towel. Like I almost did in California. Here's a quick lesson in how a place you don't like, with a vibe you instictively shrink from, can ruin your whole world. +Once you know how to tap into and sense of the vibe of a place you'll be well on your way to making your travels a much more enjoyable experience. There are a variety of ways to do this, but the one that I've had the most success with is a kind of mediation, but not the sort of meditation you're probably familiar with. I've tried that, emptying your mind and whatnot. There's value in that, but it's never really led anywhere for me. -I've disliked California for years. Probably forever. I avoid it. The minute I set foot here I get irritable. But then I'd been gone so long I forgot why I avoided it. People always want to know why I dislike California, but I don't have an answer for that really except to say that this is a spiritually dead place to me. California has no soul. It's as simple as that. Except San Francisco, you're alright San Francisco. +I mentioned in [a recent post][1] that I often spend a good bit of time "doing nothing". Certainly more than I used it. Early on on this trip we ran around and did things. And sometimes we still do, but I would say less than we used to. These days, so long as it's a wild enough spot, we're happy hanging around camp, walking whatever trails or seashore might be around and generally doing "nothing". Sitting still and observing the world around. -I remembered that the first day we were here. We drove through Redding and I started to get cranky. My wife says I've been cranky ever since. I believe it. California puts me on edge. There is no real ryme or reason to it. I've tried to trace out what it is, but it's nothing specific, it's nothing you can pin down. It's just a place I don;t have a place in, I never have and I never will. Simple as that. +In the post linked above the "nothing" we did is stare out at the sparkling waters of Pensacola's East Bay, but it could be anything really. I spent hours watching the pine forests of Colorado, the deep woods of Mount Shasta, the deserts of the southwest, the rocky stream beds of Utah, the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada. We stare at campfires almost every night. -I've been meditating on this notion for many weeks now though and I've realized it's actually somewhat deeper than that. There may be no real rhyme or reason to it, but whatever it is seems to run deeper than just California. I am no longer who I was when I lived out here. Up until about August of this year if pressed I would probably still have called myself a westerner despite having lived in the south longer than anywhere else at this point. I have long felt that the south was my spiritual home, but I think it's hard to escape the place you were born so I would have probably, had anyone asked, still said westernerer. +But watching the world, observing the natural environment around you isn't really doing nothing. It took me quite a while to internalize that, even if I might have *said* it from the beginning. I've come to recognize that there's a big difference between saying something and actually knowing it through experience. And staring at nothing isn't doing nothing. It so happen that watching the world in silence isn't something our culture considers valuable and so you and I have been trained to casually dismiss it as "doing nothing". But the more I've done it, the more I realized that sitting, "doing nothing" is actually, possibly, the secret of the world so to speak. Whatever it may be, I can say from experience that it's incredibly valuable to me now and has helped me grow by leaps and bounds as a person. -But since I got out here again I've realized that that's not true at all. Somehow or other I have fully and truly excorized the west, particularly California, from my soul. It's not for me you see. You can have California. You can have the west. If there's no wilderness to eacape into anymore, there's no reason to be out here. +I also think it offers a practical way to get a sense of a place by learning to pick up the vibe it has. I find the relatively easy in cities, more difficult out in nature which has larger, deeper patterns that are harder to pick up on. -Somewhere along the way I became a southerner. The truth is I felt at home in the south the very first time I drove through it, starting in New Orleans and continuing along the gulf coast to Appalachicola before heading north toward Athens. But I feel at home lots of places. Paris. India. Thailand. Laos. Mexico. All places in which I have found my place. -Still, for the last eighteen years I have been a southerner. Everything I love in this country -- and there's not much left to love in my opinion -- is back somewhere along the gulf coast tucked in the bayous, beaches and oyster-rich rivers flowing into the sea. I want New Orleans and Appalachicola, I want jazz and seafood. That's where my soul is, that's where some form of life, however meager it might be, continues to thrive on these shores. That's where the soul is. -One of the things I miss most about the South is southern kindness, which is sometimes called politeness. Before I go into why though I need to define what I mean by that, which is simple: that you say hello to people when you can, yes, strangers, you hold the door for them, you pause to let them go first, you wait for them when they walk and you're in a car, you respect them and treat them as people even if you don't like them at all. Even in fact if you thorough dislike them, you still treat them as if you liked them. -Much gets made of this sense of kindness or politeness, it gets celebrated a lot, mostly by northern and westerners who think it's somehow quaint and charming. It's neither. It's it's much simpler than that. It's something that used to be called common decency, which you would extend to anyone, anyone with whom you have an I-you relationship, that is, anyone you consider a "person". Rather than calling southern politeness charming and quaint, I would prefer to call it nothing at all and define northern and especially western behavior what it is -- coarse and rude -- but then, that wouldn't be very polite. So politeness it is. -Still one thing I've noticed in 7000 miles of travel is that the lack of respect, the lack the treating the world around you and what's in it as equals is a big part of the problems our country is having just now. When you deal with the world outside yourself you can essentially treat things as either "yous" or "its". That is as "persons" or as "objects", though I prefer you and it. I'm borrowing those terms from philosopher Martin Buber because I think they work quite well, so long as you keep in mind that all dualities are concealing a third possibility. -There are, in my experience, more people with more "yous" in their lives in the south than elsewhere. This is part of what I mean when I say the south has soul. It has people who view the world around them as their equal. Not everyone of course. Perhaps not even most, but enough that you notice them. -And this part of why, despite the economic strife, racial hatreds, lack of caring from the rest of the nation, and a host of those things that would be fine excuses for being assholes, southerners remain a generally happier, pleasanter bunch of people, despite having more differences among them then the rest of the country. That's not to say the south doesn't have terrible people or is somehow a paradise. It's flawed like everything else. It's a mess too, but the people in it have at least retain the ability to go about the daily lives with a certain grace, dignity and politeness that I find missing elsewhere. +I remembered that the first day we were in California. We drove through Redding and I started to get cranky. My wife says I was cranky the rest of the time as well. I believe it. California puts me on edge. There is no real rhyme or reason to it. I've tried to trace out what it is, but it's nothing specific, it's nothing you can pin down. It's a place I don't have a place in, I never have and I never will. Simple as that. -One of the interesting outgrowths of this is that southern culture extends beyond it's borders. I can't tell you how many people have come up to us to talk because they saw our license plate. We've met Georgians, Carolinians, Louisannas, Alabamans and others who wanted to talk simply because we were also from the south, because they knew we would talk, because they knew we would treat them with respect, and perhaps because there is an unwritten understanding among those from the south that we must stick together in the face of the unkindness that has engulfed the rest. +Sometimes you end up in places where you are not happy for one reason or another and you can't leave them. That's when traveling gets hard and people end up throwing in the towel. Like I almost did in California. -And so we're headed back that way. It'll take us a while, and frankly that's good because it's unseasonably cold in Florida right now, to say nothing of Texas. But still, the west has been fun in a way, educational let's say, but now we're eastbound, looking for some white sands, some seafood, and some southern kindness to remind us why we started this adventure in the first place. |