Introduction: A Note On Travel and Travel Writing
Be awake for the operation.
Reading about someone else’s adventure is like reading a medical textbook.
Going and traveling yourself is like being awake for a surgical operation.
Writing about my own travel is sensitive; in a way I am writing this while covered in blood. My own. I was remade a little, you see.
Reality has sharp edges sometimes. I feel like I walked out of my house two months ago and threw myself against them like an ocean swell, and like the swell, I broke and scattered and slid back. And lest you think I had an awful experience in the Pacific, let me assure you this wasn’t the case. Beauty and goodness can be as difficult for the soul to tolerate as terrible evil, but the difference is that there’s more life after the breaking, not less. So the following posts are my attempt to share my new surplus of life with you.
If, as you read these writings, you think you see proof of my personal failings, my cowardice, or my ignorance, don’t worry - you have read them correctly. Travel is as much a mirror as a window. I bring myself wherever I go, and there is nothing so honest as a crossed horizon.
There’s really no escaping, in this life. It’s one of the harshest and kindest parts of exploration - travel will tell you the truth about yourself in a ringing voice. All the little selfish pettinessess you’ve let sink in, all the entitlements and cowardly habits that you’ve adopted to avoid real repentance, all the responsibilities you’ve ignored because you’ve blinded yourself to the effects of your actions - no running from any of that now. You can’t get away - Jonah taught us that as children. Not even in the depths of the sea.
But thing is, travel doesn’t leave you stripped bare. It’s not just a mirror to your worst faults - done rightly, travel closes the loving wounds as well. It clothes the imagination in frothing waterfalls and birdsong and the fragrance of flowering rainforests. It offers new virtues to try on in place of the old faults: patience, and curiosity, and humility, and respect. It creates new attachments and new loves and new language to moisten our dry tongues. Travel is rewarding. The rewards must be earned, and the only way to earn them is to go and throw yourself on the solid Rock of reality, and break, and be remade.
So have a little grace for me as I write about my travel in the Pacific. I’m new to myself, now. I’m still healing. I was remade a little, you see.
