home.
This photo has nothing to do with anything except #bougainvilleaforever and the fact that I came across it again in my photo library (from the train station in Riomaggiore).
. . . .
I just spent a week and a half in Morocco (and in transit to and from Morocco). It was an incredible trip and I loved so many things about it. I posted some photos along the way; after collecting my thoughts and sorting through all the photos I'm sure there will be more coming in this space soon.
I am grateful for the opportunities I have had to travel and to experience other places and the kinds of lives people lead there. In these moments away from my life in America I have learned more about myself and been reminded, too, of why I love my life in America; I am reminded once again how blessed we are in our free country with innumerable modern conveniences, forward-thinking cultural climes, and autonomy. It is easy for me to forget these things when it is dark and cold outside and I am weary of winter and dreary days, longing for sunshine and faraway places.
For my birthday, my dear friend Emily gave me a copy of Antoine de Saint Exupéry's memoir "Wind, Sand and Stars." He was a pilot in the early days of what is now Air France, making mail deliveries to rural and remote outposts in the Sahara and northern Africa. As a proponent of all things Anne Fadiman, I brought this for my trip reading, what Anne (I can be on a first name basis with her, right?) calls, "You-are-there reading." How apropos, too, that during our trip we saw a screening of Le petit prince, authored also by Saint-Exupéry (ah! so beautiful). I keep thinking of the quote below:
"Inside the narrow skull of the miner pinned beneath the fallen timber, there lives a world. Parents, friends, a home, the hot soup of evening, songs sung on feast days, loving kindness and anger, perhaps even a social consciousness and a great universal love, inhabit that skull. By what are we to measure the value of a man? His ancestor once drew a reindeer on the wall of a cave; and two hundred thousand years later that gesture still radiates. It stirs us, prolongs itself in us. Man's gestures are an eternal spring. Though we die for it, we shall bring up that miner from his shaft. Solitary he may be; universal he surely is." -Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, p. 204
Various experiences remind me how we are all connected to one another, despite countries and borders and barriers of language and culture. During my trip, I was terribly carsick on a bus in the middle of the Rif Mountains. I felt so miserable and wished I was home, but alas I still had three more hours of winding roads before I had even a riad bed to my name. The Moroccan woman sitting with her boyfriend in the row in front of me turned around, put her hand reassuringly on my knee, and said, "Relax," the only English word I heard her say throughout the bus ride, beyond our brief communication in French and her conversations with her boyfriend in Arabic. Our world has many problems and struggles, but these moments of compassion and understanding between strangers give me hope.
I had a grand time, and am jumping right back into real life and responsibilities. My jet lag is catching up to me and I can't stop yawning. What a lovely thing to be able to fall asleep, happily and quite content to be in my own bed in this life that I love.
.JPG)
