QTSL No. 10 : Wander Lust
On getting lost, finding breadcrumbs, and piecing it together one step at a time
I like to wander. When I’m setting out in a new city I usually walk out the door, turn left or right and see what happens. Come to think of it, that is pretty much how I approach my whole life. The idea of planning out a day when traveling is so foreign to me that I’m frequently stumped when someone asks what I plan to do when I’m here or there. Unless a city has exceptional public transit, I am usually confined within the parameters that my feet can carry me. The limitations of my physical stamina hold the container necessary to wander freely.
Sometimes I might take a train or taxi to a particularly interesting part of town but it’s rarely to see a specific site and more to find a new little world, a semi-distant universe.
I get a real sense of place in a city when I am able to take a few days to wander in this way. I may not know street names or north/souths but I can tell you where the best flower boxes are, where to go when you want to see lots of attractive men in suits, where people will look you in the eye and where they won’t, where to see the street art, and where to converse with friendly shop owners.
I frequently miss out on the main attractions of a certain place. I know that when I start to see more tourists than locals I’ve walked myself squarely to the front of the curtain, the secrets of the city nestled behind. It’s for this reason that I don’t often travel to see the sites, I travel to unearth parts of myself that different cities evoke.
I go to Paris when I want to feel rooted and winged all at once.
I go to New York when I want to be jolted out of complacency.
I go to Chicago when I want to be wrapped up in safety and sturdiness.
I go to Taos when I want to speak to the soil.
I go to Wyoming when I want to feel small and to the sea when I want to feel smaller.
I’ve alluded to my mounting desire to leave Colorado and I can see, thanks to the delicious structure of Chicago, that it’s because I have been too many women there to truly become who I wish to be now. At every corner I see her: the depressed music student, the lonely lush, the sinner and the saint, the loved and loveless, the caretaker, the good granddaughter, the bad friend, the ghost haunting the hospital, the five year old in the thirty-five year old body holding a wooden box of ashes, and now the recluse pacing her house watching the days pile on the floor like dirty laundry.
The beauty of being a ‘wandering star’ as my dad calls me, is that I allow myself to be shaped by newness. The shadow side is that I sometimes fail to hold the shape that identity requires. I forget who I am and what I want, I blur boundaries, I lose track of time, I detach from everything.
The word wander finds its roots in Old English and relates to ‘wend’ or ‘the wind’. How true this is. Just because you can feel the wind doesn’t mean you can see it. Just because you can blow here and there doesn’t mean that you are existing anywhere.
So how does a windy wanderer stumble into wayfinding?
How does wind become water? Something that is flowing and free while adhering to form?
I can’t know for sure but I think it might have something to do with the beginning and the end. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus must leave his kingdom of Ithaca to battle for ten years in the Trojan War. The 24 books powerfully illustrate the necessity of leaving and the vitality of returning. From Ithaca he comes and to Ithaca he must return, both the same and utterly changed.
The only way to wander without that shadowy formlessness eclipsing your spirit is to hold your own promise to return.
Return to what? Anywhere you are able to land I suppose. You can return to the doorstep of your home or the blank page of your journal, to a person or a pet, you can return to prayer or poetry, to the kitchen table or the river’s edge.
We all must leave. That is our curriculum here. We must wander out and be startled and disturbed and riveted and overcome. This is the journey and we the humble heroes.
But while you’re out lapping up all that life force and making all those mistakes, hold the image of your own shining doorstep in your heart. When all is said and done that is where you’ll return and god I hope it feels like a celebration because that is what this humanness really is: leaving, losing, finding, loving, and living to tell the tale.