Travel with love

Another glorious weekend if imperfect perfection. I visited Vienna for the first time and saw my dear friend Dianna for the first time since June. Long overdue. The weather was mostly gloomy, and we talked and talked and talked and talked about love and travel and solitude and happiness and emptiness. We've both had lots of changes over the past year, and are both forging new paths into thrilling and death-defying territory. And these past two years have been big ones. We're growing up, if by that we mean meeting new joys and challenges and learning to love ourselves for all that (growing, but not grown).

We talked about what we want and need, what we expect from the ones we love and why we love them. When you're traveling, which we both are, you spend a lot of time with only yourself for company, and when you're in a new place, under new light, you look different, even to yourself. You question all these things that you didn't have to when you were at home, and after so much travel and self reflection we were both bursting at the seams. And it was Easter, so we ate a ton of chocolate.

So it was good, and tough, because when you're in a vulnerable situation like traveling, you organize your thoughts and emotions so that you're more stable and better equipped to move. Some thoughts get put on the back burner to make room for new thoughts. Those new thoughts are stored away so you get at them if you need them, but also in a way that doesn't let them overwhelm you. I think my brain is like a big, huge, industrial wearhouse with high ceilings and lots of dust and light and darkness. When you get in there to reorganize, to pull out things you've been storing up to show someone with whom you feel safe, everything gets less orderly and a little more difficult to manage. Ideally though, you've got your friend there to help you put things back into place and maybe reorganize in a way you hadn't thought of before. Reorganization is hard though, and anybody who has seen my room knows that organization doesn't often make it to the top of my list (who's going to watch that episode of Parks and Rec for the 5th time if I don't?!).
It's confusing when things feel right, or like they're headed somewhere important but they're messy and not altogether comfortable. In these times when things are not easily quantifiable, we look for non-traditional heroes, oracles that teach us things that make us squirm a little. Tom Robbins knows- just listen:


Flowing white hair and a dirty bathrobe, weathered face and hand-made sandals, teeth that would make an accordion jealous, eyes that twinkled like bicycle lights in the mist...He looked as if he had stolen down from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, by way of a Yokohama opium parlor... He looked as if he rolled out of a Zen scroll, as if he said “presto” a lot, knew the meaning of lightening and the origin of dreams. He looked as if he drank dew and fucked snakes. He looked like the cape that rustles on the back stairs of Paradise.


Right? Teeth that would make an accordion jealous. I'd follow him into the mist, that's for sure.

Love,

Alex