Around the World in 108 Days

Inexplicably, going around the world was something I wanted to do; it meant something to me.

What?

I just looked at the huge map of our journey that is out in our central meeting location, and I see that what took about 90 days on the other side of the planet is taking 20 something on this, the Pacific side.

Swooooosh and we are almost home… Costa Rica this weekend, then the Panama Canal crossing, then Miami and Elizabeth.

“Turn around and you’re two, turn around and you’re four, turn around and you’re a young man going out of the door.” (If you are female, you are used to using some imagination to see how the lyrics apply to you.)

I graded my last set of final papers today. I have never given so many A’s in my life. I suppose it helps to be in a closed environment, so very close to our various duties. I have not been late or absent once myself!

Neither have I begun to digest or even report the highlights of my journey…

How Lyn, one of the ‘lifelong learners,’ and I ended up sharing a lift up the mountainside in Guilin, China, how we tacitly agreed to share the silence as we glided through scented blossoming trees and pine tress, and the songs of birds, and dartings of butterflies. Half an hour up in glorious silence with a space for the birds in our ears, and a space for the pine in our nostrils, and half an hour down with a space for the distant mountains and clouds in our eyes. How we have carried away this connectedness for having shut up together!

How I tried to bargain for two silver-framed agate bowls, and the man who sold them, how he trapped me physically, and then, oh she wasn’t a man and she was holding on to me physically such that I suddenly realized I would need either rescue or strategy or both. I began to sing and then to dance with her, twirling around and turning myself out of the embrace, calling for Evelyn to come rescue me from down the street where she had gotten to. And she did come laughing hard and taking photos… yes, eventually I shall post one. How the young Chinese consumers were amused (or appalled) to see an older generation American dancing to rock music in the promenade in front of the young fashion store, out of which boomed some techno-dance sounds, familiar from my own youth.

How the professors at the art University appreciated my brush technique for bamboo—yes, they really did! And then how disappointed they were that it did not translate to clouds and how they had to re-evaluate me from having been almost amongst their ranks to being a student with promise. It was good enough praise to cause me to buy a set of brushes. Yes, indeed, got potential to realize in some lifetime…

How, as we departed the hotel in Guilin that last morning, I heard people saying my name and room number, “Anne, 525… Anne…Where is Anne?” And I sat on the bus contentedly knowing I had checked out early and paid for everything. And now they are at the bus saying, “but she left something in the room.” It was my stuffed piggy, Bethan, delivered to me on the bus for all to see. So I was outed as having brought a stuffed toy, not only on the ship, but on my field explorations. I explained that she served as a spare pillow; the explanation made it worse.

I have not even mentioned how I loved Mt. Koya-san and the mad monk, Kurt, who sent me off from the monastery with incense and sake, after a couple of long and lovely conversations over my two days there. How the elaborate tantric service in the dark temple filled my senses, leaping flames, singing gongs and cymbals and bells and voices, smell and sting of incense, taste of fruit, movement of muscle; and repose….

How it was to walk for hour after hour through the twelve hundred year old cemetery in a forest, miles long with two thousand stone monuments glowing in the forest as clouds gathered and parted overhead; and then to dash through the breaking storm for a late lunch of quiche and curry, cake and coffee. Yes, I did have my umbrella and when I arrived at the monastery gate in the cold and wet afternoon, I was grateful to be home and soon even more grateful when a young monk brought hot sake to my room!

I had prepared myself for rigors, told myself the monastery would likely have no heat….

The next morning this same young monk offered me a lift to the tram station for my ride down the mountain to the rail station. I sat in the back seat telling him that I had a contemplative heart but a busy life. “Me too,” he said. And he told me how he had been at the monastery for one month of a year’s training assignment, how hard he worked, how tired he was, how he wanted the hell out of there. And I remembered my own almost-convent youth, how postulancy was so much about scrubbing and novitiate about deprivation. I felt such tenderness for him; now and then he comes to mind and I mark the time with him as he counts down the days till next March when he will return home to Hiroshima.

Suddenly, I have been around the world… and shopped… and now must face packing and shipping… and conscience. I have been around the world. I often fall asleep with the predictable lyrics from that old Heart song, “Mamma ocean, hold me to you,” as she lifts me up and drops me down in the cadence of her great walking across the planet.

She has carried me to Brazil, and to Africa, and to India, and to Vietnam and Cambodia, to China and to Japan, to Honolulu, and now to Costa Rica. I have been around the world, all in one go… as I dreamed in my childhood that I would do… and it is a dream of water and air and apparitions, like a magic show, or a dream of a magic show…

I begin to wonder, how do you follow that? What do you do after you have gone around the world? Perhaps commercial space flight has some value, after all!