Taking and giving

I’ve spent a whole lot of time in all the museums while I’ve been in England.  Our family have great stamina for a museum, easily able to spend all its open hours moving slowly along, reading all the plaques, returning to the cool stuff.  It’s especially easy to destroy a full day in any given museum in London, where Britain stores all its (and others’!) hoards.  There just so. much. stuff. crammed into all these glass cases.  This time in London, I’ve focused mostly on the sciencey collections, mostly because the last time I visited London I did my diligence in the art spaces.  

Look!: here’s the telescope built by William Herschel to discover Uranus in 1781! 

Look!: here’s a taxidermied thylacine, the extinct marsupial beloved by B!  

Look!: here’s the pliosaur discovered by Mary Anning in 1811 in Lyme Regis!  

I don’t know what it says about the relative values of their sponsoring cultures, but I’m endlessly amused by the fact that in Italy, the museums cost a pile of money to enter but the churches are free; while in England, you pay to enter the churches but the museums are all free.  Or rather, as my favorite resident civil servant corrects me, not free but paid for by the British taxpayer—for which I can only offer my sincere thanks.  It’s a gift to be able to gaze upon Artemisia Gentileschi’s self-portrait for an hour.  It’s a gift to circle the Rosetta stone in a slow parody of deciphering.  It’s a gift to have my native hunger to see everything generously filled, and filled daily.

Indeed, this whole year of travel is an unspeakable gift to me, especially after the long years of walking alongside Jay in his decline, and in the end having my days occupied by his care.  And beyond the gift of travel and adventure, I’ve been gifted extravagantly by people very dear to me as I go, with shared meals and warm hospitality and generous lodging and enlivening conversation.  I’m not accustomed to being in this position of constant receiving—not able in my itinerancy to contribute much of substance, but instead constantly taking what’s offered to me so kindly.  “You put out and I receive,” as Peter Gabriel has sung.  I take the kindnesses.  I take trains and planes and hikes.  And I'm taking a profound break from the usual economies of human exchange.  I’m not teaching, not volunteering at the food bank, not caretaking my beloveds but being endlessly taken care of by others.  I really just can’t reciprocate what I’m taking.  What am I giving during this season?  Certainly my attention, certainly my gratitude.

 

 

Text-based days

This present moment is the period of my journey in which I don't have a ton of scenic photos to post.  I'm in and out of London for a few days, with trips to Oxford and Cambridge, to see friends and to be amongst the literary folks.  I don't feel comfortable posting images on the internets of friends I'm spending time with, and I'm not really sightseeing, except incidentally as the sights I may see are near the company I'm keeping.  Consequently, this travelogue is, at least for the moment, more text-based than image-based.  

I have spent a decent amount of time in England--more time in Cambridge than anywhere else, but even then, in my early 20s, I visited London from time to time.  And I will not lie to you:  I hated London.  Found it busy and loud and impossible to navigate, which took all the fun out of exploring it for me.  I hated getting lost in London, which I did every time I visited London, and I hated that I felt at the mercy of everyone from taxi drivers to corner shop proprietors just to find the way from point A to point B.  London is not what you'd call master planned--not all that surprising, given its long, long history, which saw the city develop from disparate and disconnected centers of human activity slowly into an enormous metropolis.  

So it was with true surprise that I spent time here during the fall of 2023 and discovered, after decades of innumerable passings-through, that I loved London.  

(The Royal Albert Hall, which we now know how many holes it takes to fill)

Do not imagine, friend, that this newfound affection is due to my finally having become sophisticated enough that I find myself at home in an enormous metropolis.  No, there is one single feature that has changed my attitude about London utterly:  the smart phone.  

As many know, I was a late adopter of this technology.  It was only when E went to college that Jay dragged me to Best Buy, saying, "You need to be able to stay in touch with your son."  Jay's thinking was that if E was going to be in touch from college it was more likely to be by sending images than by calling every day.  Jay was absolutely correct, and I'm deeply grateful that his foresight has kept me in good touch with E, and then B, across state lines (and now continental borders).

But a surprising side-effect of that desire to be tethered to my kids is that I have (as we all now have) a map! In my pocket!  That tells me the way from point A to point B!  And this technology has made London far less impenetrable to me.  I no longer spend my days here walking in circles trying to find the little alley that leads through to another alley that ends up at a cool museum.  I just let the phone do the work!  I let the phone tell me which Tube station is the nearest to my intentions.  I let the phone tell me whether that little Egyptian takeout in Covent Garden has enough vegetarian options to make it worth walking all the way over there. (It does, and you should: Koshari Street.)  

I know, I know:  this is pretty much what we all do now, and even though it feels miraculous to me, everyone around me is capable of the same miracle.  I'm just saying that London is a kind of emblem of the ways that this device in my pocket has re-formed what we expect out of our lived experience, and though I have spent the last several months interacting with cultures that were foreign to me in both geography and language, using the electronic map to navigate and the translate app to make myself understood (not to mention those video communications apps that Jay intuited would keep me connected in a more intimate way with my dear ones), it's in London--in some regards the least foreign foreign place I have traveled--that I am most able to see (in before-and-after fashion) the changes that common technologies have wrought in our daily lives.  

Theorizing the pause

So, I'm planning to spend the rest of January and February in Ireland and England.  I'm visiting friends and returning to old haunts, and also spending a goodly amount of time renewing myself in the spiritual home to me that is the Wild Atlantic Way, the west coast of Ireland.  And I'm so grateful to be able to be here again.  But it is verily a strange thing to be in such familiar places after Central Asia and Cambodia. My general feeling right now is an extension, even an intensification, of what I was feeling in New Zealand: that it's almost too easy to be in places that accommodate themselves so readily to me.  

(Out on the Burren)

I confess that during the first stretch of my travels, I got accustomed to adventure, to being confronted daily with things I did not understand and with problems (even small ones relating to my not speaking Kazakh, for instance) I had to solve.  Am I admitting to something as shallow as being proud of myself for being able to figure things out on the fly?  I'm not sure.  It felt more like exhilaration, that sense of being constantly having to learn and adapt, like a set of challenges that kept daily life from ever settling into mundanity.  And did I get addicted to the adrenaline of it all?  Yes, certainly I did--but that's not really much of a surprise given my natural affinity for that excellent drug.  I wonder if it's impossible-- logistically, financially, even physiologically--to be adrenalized all the time.  I'm trying to think of this more restful period not as tapping out but as an opportunity to process before the next set of challenges.

(The Poulnabrone Dolmen, Neolithic wedge tomb dating to about 6000 years ago)

To keep myself from settling into the mundane, though, I'm spending loads of time outside, even better if the weather is wild.  When I was younger, I used to work in the Burren, in County Clare, and its limestone moonscape offers miles and miles of exploration terrain.  What it lacks in altitude it makes up for in wind and treachery: ask me about the time in 1993 when I gave myself stitches after falling through a grike and opening my skin down to the shinbone.  A different kind of exhilaration.  I have carried a needle and thread in my backpack ever since.

(Hiking on Mullaghmore, elevation 600 feet! LOL, with its awesome swirly geology)

Endless engine

January is my favorite month in Ireland.  I love the drama of the weather and the sea and the wind, and I love that it's very easy to be alone here during all that drama.  I don't need to compete for lodging with other people, and though I may encounter a few naked Germans on the beach, it's generally peaceful and empty.  

(The sea off Dun Chaoin, afroth)

(A very old stone on the Dingle Peninsula)

Sometimes it's sunny, mostly it's not. The Irish describe their weather as "rain between the showers." But when the sun comes out, the views out there off Slea Head and toward America are pretty sweet.  Still, I genuinely love the stormy days.  When I lived here, I would lie awake at night listening to the surf pounding against the shore and thought that it sounded like nothing so much as a ceaseless engine trying to bore its way beneath the house.  It's one of my favorite sounds, soothing in its assertion that I am a small thing on this planet and not in charge at all.