Travel and the Human Condition

"I just called home. I'm sitting here in Heathrow Airport in London waiting for British Airways to take me to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.   I had to call before leaving for Africa.  It's like a slow death.  You feel, even amid the intense excitement of the long-planned journey, that you are dying a little piece at a time as you get farther and farther away from home. I ache not only for how I feel, but for those whom I left behind.  Some will miss me, some will be concerned for me, some will envy me, some will suspect me, but none will be unaffected totally.  I don't purposely inflict these feelings on myself or those whom I leave.  I just want to see everything, know everything and feel everything before my traveling days are done.  That, in itself, can't be intrinsically bad or selfish.  But, I do anguish over why I can't be content with a so-called "Normal" and mundane life.  I wish that I could be happy with the commonplace, the safe and secure.  It's a heavy load to bear. I suffer far more than anyone knows or understands.  I sit here and look at the strange people from many different exotic lands and feel very worldly and smug.  Yet, I feel sadness that the human condition forces so many of us to leave our nests and root about madly in search of the unknown and different.  But, in the end, it's always the well known, the safe and secure things , that bring us the comfort and nourishment that all of us need so badly."

"The dancer, eyes glazed, galloped over to me , extending his hand for me to take and invited me to take part in the horse-dancing.  I declined demurely.  How do you say "No" to a drug-crazed horse?  The intent of the ceremony and dance, I learned later, was to communicate with the spirits of the deceased villagers through the trance dancers.  It was hoped that those spirits would enter the dancers' bodies and allow them to tell the living villagers secrets of the beyond and prophecies of the future.  I'm not certain what meaning the horses had.  It was an evening of contrasts, going from a secret Christain prayer  meeting to a primitive dance in the jungle under the light of a full moon.  It showed the odd, exciting dichotomy of man's diverse forms of faith.  Under our thin veneer of civilization, live semi-dormant  ancient beliefs------beliefs in devils, ghosts, incantations, curses and sacrifices.  In Java, these instinctual beliefs lie closer to the surface than do ours because they live closer to the earth, the God-Mother of us all.  But, you and I are not immune to those beliefs.  That evening, in a cleared area in a Javanese  jungle, I felt an odd familiarity come over me, an almost friendly aura as if the spirits of my own deceased family and friends had, somehow, come to hover over me on that moon-bright night in Java, so far, so very far from home."