The travel journal begins…
Saturday, April 18th, 2008 ~ Luxor, Egypt
Travel, for me, is like life concentrated. It is like a strong espresso or a stiff liquor. It hits hard, and you pay for it later sometimes, but it also takes you to incredible heights. It is like injecting something straight into the vein, and though I am glad I am not as addicted as I could be, I am afraid I started young and will probably never really get it out of my system. I make up for this by hiding out and going almost nowhere when I am at home. And then I take a big leap and find myself in Africa. In a different kind of home, both familiar and foreign, every time. But travel itself, as uncomfortable as it usually is, becomes a sort of companion whose endless change and total mutability is a strange reprieve from a life of what is often false security anyway. Travel pushes me…sometimes onto my knees…but deep and hard into myself, and out of myself. And I am glad to say it is the only, thank the universe, semi-abusive relationship that I have never been able to let go of.
It is hard, and soft. It is labor, it is birth. It is a miracle, and a suffering. It is something brilliant, and it makes me fearless. There is suddenly no “great world” out there, but I am in that great world…it is all around me…I am it. The world becomes small and reaches out a hand to touch me, and I am everywhere.
All the while my body is stretched beyond its capacity, and somehow it always makes the stretch. After the first ten-hour flight to Paris I actually felt quite good. I was so proud of myself. This is going to be a smooth trip, I thought. After five hours in the Paris airport, having been up all night I was still feeling good. Though the walls were beginning to move and delerium was setting in, I ate a designer sandwich and felt alright. The five hour flight to Cairo is when it started to hit me. By then we had traveled all day and night, and the four-hour wait at the Cairo airport was a limbo-land someplace outside of my physical form. My stomach ached from the airline food I always have to resort to when my healthy food bars don’t cut it. I willed my legs to keep moving (and even to run when we found out our luggage wasn’t going to come with us to Luxor…but to no avail).
So by the time we made the one-hour flight to Luxor, arriving at midnight, and tried to file a report to get our luggage, we were exhausted. Two days later we still don’t have our luggage, but you know there is something very simple about wearing the same clothes every day and using lotion to condition your hair. And travel does make you grateful for the simple things…the kindness of strangers when you find it, someone who speaks your language enough to understand what the hell you are talking about, a decent meal…and then there is the arrival…
The moment when you realize you have made it to the place you made all that effort to reach…the moment you see the nile again stretching out before you, and the palms waving at you accross it. The moment you feel the presence of the beings you hold so dear reaching into you from deep in the earth…welcoming you. The moment you see the temples rising straight up out of the ancient past and filling your broken body with absolute and total bliss. And it suddenly doesn’t matter if you are starving or aching…you will something beyond your body to set you free and you move on pure prana…and as long as you can still stand upright you are alright for a while.
I wonder sometimes if everyone travels like me or not. I wonder if some people take simple trips, or have a different endurance level. I wonder if some take it softer…water down their stiff drinks. I know there must be a wisdom in that, and yet I am already ruined for that kind of travel…or that kind of life really. I have learned to enjoy it slowly when needed, but never to water it down.
It is good to know how to go with the flow when traveling, especially in Egypt. Apparently our conference was flagged as unfavorable in some way (threatening perhaps?) and blackballed. No hotel in Luxor, or Egypt for that matter, is allowed to give us space to hold this metaphysical conference. (Don’t try to understand why…it would make you dizzy with its irrational circles.) But this has forced the facilitators to split the group into parts and take them to the temples for three days. In the temples we are allowed to lead our meditations and talks, which I think is extraordinary and thrills me to no end. Instead of teaching in a conference room I will be toning in the temples. Like a dream come true.
In the meantime, before the conference starts tomorrow, I will be praying to the Goddess of Lost Luggage to help us with a miracle tonight. And I will go out now just in time to sit on the barge on the nile and watch the sun set with a flame inside my heart. I am nowhere somehow, and yet I wouldn’t be anywhere else right now. I am grateful, for everything my life has held, and for the chance to be in this homeland again.
I will hope you will all be with me in spirit in these next few days, as I tone, chant to the Egyptian Deities, and teach fellow oracles in the great temples…at the dawn of the Great Remembering.
My love to all of you…
Jennifer
