Softcore Geography

Photos: Porto, Budapest, Berlin

Recently had a realization. While I typically do my best to find things about each place I visit that I love, and also that I hate (I am a very democratic person), there are always those cities that I fall for. For varying reasons I have a very intimate relationship with the Caribbean Sea. For a very specific reason I will struggle through a life-long love affair with the hills of Northern Thailand. For obvious reasons the mountains and the ocean in Northern California make me want to fall to my knees and profess unwavering lust to that drive over Mount Tam into Bolinas Beach (please take me back, I promise it was me and not you that made me go). And for some reason there are certain cities in Europe that make me feel something that others cease to evoke.

A couple weeks ago I spent a weekend in Porto, Portugal. It was brilliant. The wine was cheap and sunsets were, I swear to God, electric, and painted tiles flaked off tightly packed, skinny homes like chipped nail polish. And it felt alive so I fell in love. 

I do not like conformity. I do not like feeling pressured to act, or be, or even SEEM any certain way. I am not an unperturbed person. There are cities in the world that ask something of you. I have no problem laboring for my love, but if it is order over chaos, silence over noise, I will never do it. I like my places like I like my people. I like cities that function in a mild state of disarray. I like to see the guts of a place spilling out. I want to get my hands dirty. I want to know that I am free because I can see it, feel it. And then I can love it. 

xx

Procrastination as a Physical Activity

Photos: London Eye, Regent's Park, British Museum, God's Own Junkyard

How do I go about convincing myself that blogging is something I should be bothered with? Treats as a reward? The VERY REAL possibility of becoming an international blogging sensation? An aid to my ailing memory?

Spending my days procrastinating the last of the London workload. In three weeks from today I will arrive in Vietnam. As ready as I am to be out of Europe, my heart already aches with the idea of leaving behind this comfortable little life I have built myself here. So it will be three weeks in Vietnam and then off to either Burma or Indonesia (again). I keep on going back and forth. I think that Indo is the easy choice, and I do not know how much more time I can realistically spend looking at temples in Burma after doing it for eight months straight. Today, Indo sounds perfect. Tomorrow, maybe Burma. Choosing between two beautiful options but the decision tugs me still.

xx

A Word on Invincibility

Spending time in Asia has largely confirmed my belief that the notion of invincibility is of Western creation. There are a million explanations for this, from our aversion to the topic of death to our upbringing relatively void of boundaries (both imposed and created), which I will not go into at this time. That being said, however (at the risk of breaking young hearts and minds), I would like to go on record pointing out that WE ARE NOT INVINCIBLE. We are fragile and made of skin and bones. We are capable of falling and cracking. I do not suggest that anyone live their lives with this idea in the forefront of their minds, but it must be said occasionally for the sake of compassion and quiet urgency, if for no other reason. Allow this notion to intertwine your life with another, not to harbor fear or inspire the life of an introvert.

All of that being said, there is one thing in my life that makes me feel invincible. Every time I feel weakened or at risk of rejection (which, according to Steinbeck, is the root of all anger, crime, guilt and evil), I am eased by the reassurance of my safety net, the network of people I can always fall back on. I have been blessed with the constant support of some of the most strong, inspiring people and they are the ones who make me invincible. It is not my bones or my wallet or even my assiduousness that make me unbreakable, but merely the love coming from others.

They are excessively warm hands.

Photo: James Henkel

I have always been fascinated by peoples' hands. From my mother's long, delicate hands of bone, tendon and gold to my father's large, spatulate palms, which from a youthful perspective appeared battered yet capable. These are the hands that raised me. Hands are action, they are humanity. They build cities and they tear the wings off butterflies. They can tell a person's story or keep the deepest secrets. They wring, writhe, wipe tears and throw punches. At the start of a romance, hands are the conduits of emotion and the tentative explorers of the uncharted territory known as another's body. Hands are power, compassion, kindness and cruelty.

When traveling and meeting new people one of the first things I see is their hands. Are they the hands of a worker, a scholar, an artist, a woman confident and comfortable in her skin, a man who has taken the weight of the world into his palms? Often these first impressions are incorrect, or incomplete, but everyone needs a starting point. I know that I have crossed into a comfortable, familiar territory with another when I find my hands on their arms, hair, bodies without making a conscious decision to do so. They carry heat, they form caverns, they retract in fear. They heal life and they end life. They make friends and lasting relationships and they keep in touch. 

I love hands. I love the fluidity with which they move. I love the feeling of others' hands; what it can mean to feel that. I love to see what people do with them, if they fold them softly in their laps, they crack and bend them with nerves, they charm snakes or they mend a broken arm. They are the ultimate reflection of humanity, of our fragility and our strength. 

They are excessively warm hands,

that continually want to cool

themselves and involuntarily lay

themselves on any cool object, 

outspread, with air between the fingers.

Into those hands the blood could

shoot, as it mounts to a person's

head, and when clenched, 

they were indeed like the heads

of madmen, raging

with fancies.

Ranier Maria Rilke

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