Wanderesolutions

This is Megan, a performer from Quixotic. She and her team were absolutely amazing. Awe-inspiring & delighting. I'm also really, really proud of this photo. http://quixoticfusion.com/
This is Megan, a performer from Quixotic. She and her team were absolutely amazing. Awe-inspiring & delighting.
I’m also really, really proud of this photo. http://quixoticfusion.com/

I’m coming down from the high of Wanderlust-Stratton. While I’ve worked every day since the 16th, supporting the festival was hardly labor. As my first festival experience, I spent the entire four-day period wrapped in wonder, exploring. I’m sad to say I didn’t suck the marrow from the festival, but I’m also not surprised. I didn’t know how much I would be needed in the office, so didn’t sign up for many classes or lectures. I popped in on a few, but found that my body was so out of yoga shape that I was nearly crippled by day four, conveniently when I decided I wanted to do a Chi Running workshop.

Suffice to say I did not make it to the workshop.

But, even without the Chi Running coaching, I still feel kicked out of a weird little funk. See, I was not built for sitting still or windowless rooms. To remind myself of this, I want to write down my Wanderesolutions.

  • Move every day.
  • Explore, with wonder.
  • Write where someone else can see.
  • Appreciate the wealth in simplicity.
I totally posed this photo.
I totally posed this photo.

The first two points need no explanation. They come from Wanderlust directly. To move one’s body and explore everything, inside and out.

IMG_3785
Om shanti shanti shanti.

The second two merit, I think, some introduction. To write where someone else can see is to write bravely. Which means, mostly, writing here. But also, I’d like to write for publication. I’ve said this for years. Now that I’ve claimed my quiet places in both the woods and our house, it’s time to make time for that. To do it, perhaps with shyness, but to do it anyway.

As to simplicity. In middle school, I bought a copy of “Walden.” I started reading it, as evidenced by a few underlined passages. Past the pencil lines, I see a self-conscious un-understanding; knowing these things were personally significant while being uncomfortably aware that the words were not really significant yet. Like an premonition. It makes way more sense now.

In short, between now and next year, I have an awful lot of Wanderlusting to do. Let’s go.

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Wanderlust

It’s been too long since I last disappeared. I miss the weight of a rucksack on my shoulder. I miss the moment when I first step off of a metro in a strange new city; the nanosecond-long pause to inhale the new air and realize it’s just the same as the air at home.

(I lost countless photographs in a hard-drive crash during college. I have so few photos left from my travels… Here’s one. Hopefully hard copies of the rest have survived, buried somewhere in my parents’ basement.)

A moment's rest on Mt Luxmore.
A moment’s rest on Mt Luxmore.

“You’re coming to realize that travel anywhere is often a matter of exploring half-understood desires. Sometimes, those desires lead you in new and wonderful directions; other times, you wind up trying to understand just what it was you desired in the first place. And, as often as not, you find yourself playing the role of charlatan as you explore the hazy frontier between where you are, who you are, and who it is you might want to be.”

Rolf Potts, from“Tantric Sex for Dilettantes”