When I am there, it is always a time of liberation from the life of an American; I can look with fresh eyes at people and things that seem more complex, subtle and colorful, and I wonder why. Is it merely that I hear the sounds of Haakan, Tamil, Bahasa and English, the accents of Australia, England, and the Middle East? It is a linguistic composite as well as a gastronomic composite, all flavored by the smoke of "the other," but there are so many "others" that the incense of one culture wafts into and blends with another so that the air is never clear, the flavors never simple, the exchange always layered. I love being there, perhaps because I am a whole day away from here...
I find myself now that I am back at my teaching, living at home with my dog, engaged in the routine of rehearsals, church, and meetings, often looking up into the sky to look at an airplane. The plane looks small and slow from where I stand sturdily on my spot of soil that is mine, that is home, and yet I always project myself onto that plane, that moving entity that is taking me somewhere else, taking me away or to or "there." I wonder if we are every anything or anywhere BUT "other" or "there." So often as I walk from the train to school and I watch the people in their cars on their way somewhere, anywhere, I wonder where I fit, where I live.
Sometimes my sister asks me what I DO when I go to Costa Rica or travel alone, and I try to explain to her that I walk, I read, I hop or I putter. She asks if I am lonely. I am alone, I say, but I am never lonely because I have my imagination and think that sometimes this imagination is bigger than I am, pushier even. In fact, this imagination, this mind, is often to controlling, so willful that I prefer to be alone because IT insists upon it. Introverts need space, time and stillness just to make room for the mind. Sometimes I wonder if we are all anything BUT the mind.
When I am off in my ruminations, I am too often called into the space of now by a texture, a sound or a color; these things ground me, and so I have put these photos at the top - a textured door, spattered with graffiti, but a graffiti that compliments and enhances its original color, and the swoop and swirl of the Penang bridge, the sturdy railing of which leads the eye across the water and into the clouds, not over to a concrete, visible spot of land - both images that have been mysteriously marked or that move away into the undefined, intangible space of the imagination.
But I really must come back into the world and go to church to help set up for the service tomorrow morning. I wonder why.
No comments:
Post a Comment