Dear little friends,

I am standing in the Columbia Apparel Employee store, holding a hanger with an outrageously bright yellow fishing shirt on it. A men’s, because the women’s have lame colors and a smaller size selection. There are bits and pieces on this shirt for holding, I don’t know, hooks? Flies? Fishing poles? Features I will never use for their intended purpose.

I like the color. It screams out that I’m here on this road, so don’t pretend you don’t see me. I like the ventilation on the back and underarms, it’s nearly always hot where this shirt is going. I can see myself tooling down a road and stopping for some noodles or pad krapow. There will be a little kid peeking out from somewhere, an older kid doing their homework while playing with a phone. There might be music. There will definitely be noisy motorcycles.

This is a daydream from the past nearly 3 years dangling limply from the hanger. All around me are shoppers who look very fit and bound to use the pile of spendy clothing in their baskets on some very taxing outdoor adventures. I’m not fooled. They’ll wear this stuff to a soccer game or a trip to the Oregon Coast, gazing out at the wind-chopped waters, drinking better coffee than mine from a cozy room with a view. It’s just us, older, very out-of-shape, that will be the people on a very taxing adventure and none of these folks have a clue and I’m feeling pretty smug about that. This aspiration is what sells shirts, man.

We cut our last trip in SE Asia short when my daughter was pregnant with twins and having a hard time of it, and the pandemic was growling at us from the dark corners. Coming home over a month early was one of the best decisions ever made, but our Thai video footage has gathered digital dust and I haven’t been sure why. It certainly was not as compelling as the Myanmar section of our trip, but still had a story to tell. Leaving for home was the record scratch on our journey and I hope that I can properly tell the story from start to finish in another video someday.

We’ll leave the record scratch in, that’s extremely important.

But first, a poem:

How Surely Gravity's Law

How surely gravity’s law,

strong as an ocean current,

takes hold of the smallest thing

and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing—

each stone, blossom, child —

is held in place.

Only we, in our arrogance,

push out beyond what we each belong to

for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered

to earth’s intelligence

we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves

in knots of our own making

and struggle, lonely and confused.

So like children, we begin again

to learn from the things,

because they are in God’s heart;

they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:

to fall,

patiently to trust our heaviness.

Even a bird has to do that

before he can fly.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

I don’t know about you but my brain is somewhat busted from all of the anxiety and rage and blessings of the past three years. People pretend that the bad things are all behind us but that is simply not true. Gathering our thoughts, our courage, our restlessness, takes a lot of energy when we’re busted. The daydreams slipped through my exhaustion and wheedled away at me. Airfares plunged. Entry restrictions lifted. The call of the pad krapow, the stupidly sweet milk coffee, the khao soi, the rice, oh lord all of that rice. Bird calls heard in the background of Thai Youtube videos, oh my. Let’s go, Bruce. Can we go? Let’s go. 

Bruce has a tale to tell about gravity, the subject of the poem above and I’ll let him tell it before we go much further here. But we’re here, fiddling with our gathering and packing and dusting off our fortitude and, yes, excitement. I’m very excited. 

Heart

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Rachael AndersonBeautiful!
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2 years ago

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