Trail Through July, 2008

THAILAND
Bangkok

CHINA
Beijing, Shanghai

INDONESIA
Ubud, Seminyak, Gili Meno

Julia and Anne Marie

When taking a walk with no destination, along paths with no markings, in villages with no boundaries, on mornings with no expectations, there is a chance that you will come back a slightly different person than when you left.

I said I’d be back in 10 minutes.

But Julia and Anne Marie were out there beyond time. So when I came back 45 minutes later, Luca didn’t ask any questions. He knows when a short walk becomes a long walk, that a journey is unfurling a petal.

The forest behind the rice paddies is thick and overgrown, with crevices plunging into dark green water and palm trees rising up at unpoetic angles. But the green of it is so rich, and the rustling of the wind speaks so reassuringly of peace, that what is wild becomes beautiful, and you walk into it wishing that by loving this tangled mess of nature, that you might come closer to self-acceptance.

“Prophetic Healing – Massage”, and a handprint and an arrow. It was so deeply engraved into the rock that I wondered how it could be, how the rock was once so soft; how the healing hand had been so strong.

When taking a walk with no destination, along paths with no markings, there is a chance that you’ll come across a thing placed there by a person who knows that such walks happen. This is a patient person, and one who either believes in chance, or that there is no such thing.

I turned up the stairs.

They were thick and steep, and heavy with cement and the miles of earth and rock and molten core beneath them. The first pathway appeared to the left, and I paused to make my decision. Tilting my head backwards I saw where the stairs peaked, 10 or 15 stones ahead. It is unlike me, it is unlike most people, to stop so close to the top of something. We all have our reasons to go on. We all crave stories, and courage, and for fate to take our hand.

At the top there was nothing. A long house framed in white with windows instead of walls, all of them dark, and firmly closed. There was no one home, or if they were, they weren’t taking visitors.

I paused again, because when you have time, all moments should be given the chance to be remembered.

Descending I arrived at the first path, which was now on my right, and turned slowly but without hesitation. I was walking softly, not wanting to make more noise than the rustling through the trees. I like this intimacy with nature, and struggle to tolerate those who have no admiration for silence.

Gentle voices and a small Balinese house lay immediately ahead. I turned my head around the corner, saw two women and a deck of cards, and quickly withdrew. Perhaps it was a tarot reading, and I should come back another time. But I didn’t move, realizing of course that I would not come back. I stepped out into the clearing.

“Hello… I’m sorry to… “

Julia and Anne Marie have been following unmarked paths for 50 years. Originally from Melbourne, they now are one of the 200 families or so who live in a sub-tropical town outside of Byron Bay, Northern Queensland. Between them they have been a nurse, a midwife, a teacher a public servant, a medical anthropology PHD, a consultant to NGOs in Papua New Guinea, and an naturapath. They say “we” so often that I know they have been loving and supporting each other for a long, long time.

I turned down tea, but drank up their stories.

They have a spa bath in their back yard, and a few times they positioned everything they might need within reaching distance, and stayed in the bath the whole day.

Julia likes to write, and when she moved to Queensland wrote a column reflecting on life’s big questions for the local newsletter.

They love the diversity of their town, and have never encountered homophobia there.

Anne Marie was recently head hunted for her dream apprenticeship in Melbourne, so they got into their car and drove, and now they are house sitting because it is too expensive to rent.

Julia lived in Papua New Guinea for eight years, and now feels more at home in the tropics than in the city. She heard about this little house from some friends of hers who are building a bungalow next door. It is deep in the forest, and surrounded by paddies. ‘You’ll be in the tropics,’ they said.

And we are, sitting on their open porch, hidden from the beaten path below, where only locals make their way from where they are, to where they need to be, and back.

The locals, and today, me.

I ask them if they’d like to have dinner with Luca and I tonight. They can’t. They have been invited to the house of the local Balinese family who does their laundry.

I thank them for inviting me to sit with them.

Julia and Anne Marie laugh easily, and whenever they look at each other, they smile.

“If we don’t see you again, have a beautiful quest, Ilana.”

They must know, now, that they have become one of my stories. I know I have become one of theirs. The girl who appeared in their living room, and emanated all her dreams. And they, the lovers who lived a life they could believe in, and emanated all their love and intelligence everywhere they went.

This morning, when I decided to cede to my urge to go for a walk down that path I had not yet walked, outside my villa, past the restaurant, and to the right, into the rice paddies, into the green, into the shadow curve from where local women carrying water bottles and cement and cardboard boxes on their heads seemed to stream… when I stepped out into the world in this way and felt a tightening in my chest, I knew I was looking for something.

I found it in Julia and Anne Marie. They have fortified me, at least for this day. And in case I start to forget, I am writing this story.

There are reasons to live with compassion, and reasons to wait for love, and reasons to believe in the magic of the world.

There’s no guarantee that when you open your eyes each day, that you won’t close your eyes a slightly different person that very same evening. And when you go for a walk on a quiet, overcast morning in Ubud, you have to be prepared to let the potential for change trickle in.

First Post: Where am I?

I start this journey on a different footing than those first steps I took on October 1, 2007. Perhaps because my pain is less, the questions that drive me seem to have less justification. Perhaps because the pressing absence of career, home and partner were brought into focus during three months in Melbourne, my spiritual longings have come into question as a form of escape.

I did not mention my reservations to anyone back home. Why add fuel to such a typical and convenient point of view.

So I bound my volition to a memory of certainty, and then with characteristic debilitated determination, I packed my backpack and boarded the flight.

first stop, thailand

And now from the road I must ask, is this a continuation of my Journey Always Waiting, or is this a somewhat separate Part II? Am I starting up where I left off, or has the dilution of last Journey’s lessons by the ordinary life in between deposited me at a new drop-in point, a place somewhat estranged from the fertile grounds I was ready to harvest?

Does this Journey need a new name?

I have friends who would tell me to stop thinking about it. That it’s really of no consequence whether I am continuing, or starting again. That these are technicalities, and distractions from the only reality of true importance here… that I have taken off on a personal journey of one year, and that I am free to make of it what I wish.

They would say that the best story is the one that lies ahead, and that I do not need, nor should I want, to define it now. That I should realize what a rare and incredible gift I have given myself, and that I should walk forward with eyes and heart open, and not look back.

They are right, of course, although in an idealistic, liberated from the bench, sort of way.

For all its exhilaration, unlocking the potential of a year’s growth at this stage of my life is no trivial thing. Taking a year out to Quest is an uncalculated risk, with uncertain outcomes on the other side. I step into the light of possibilities prepared to accept that what I learn may influence the rest of my life. I realize that what I am looking for out here, may guide, or confuse me, forever.

But, why must I take it all so seriously, my friends would ask.

second stop, china

Obviously, I have a tendency towards serious analysis of almost anything. I also skew left brain in my weaknesses and right brain in my strengths. I am also overly hard on myself, and tend to feel gravely responsible for faults and offences that most others simply write off as par for the socio-emotional course.

Guilty.

But knowing this about myself gives me something valuable to work on. Acknowledging how I am feeling, particularly when the reasons for these feelings are self-defeating, is a form of self-awareness that provides a baseline for development.

And that’s why it’s important for me to understand why I feel like I do, as I start this next phase of my Journey Always Waiting. In part – in large part – so I can chart my progress.

Last year, this was somewhat easier. I set out on October 1, 2007 in total possession of my moment in time, and with acute awareness of what had passed, and why, and of how much I wanted to feel and learn of myself and of the world. For these reasons, arriving at my Final Post five months later was one of the most significant crossings of my life.

third stop, indonesia

This time, things are a little blurrier. I have a nagging sense of skirting professional development. And am anxious that after two years of living in this way, that I will have become irreversibly unconventional, horrified by the sham of work with weekends, and unable to commit to a job or a city for long enough to become stable.

There’s really no reason to disagree with me. These are all highly reasonable outcomes.

However, I am not driven by a desire to be highly reasonable. And I am also not interested in acting out of fear or insecurity.

The unknown is only frightening because it is unknown… not because there is really anything out there to fear.

So, while it’s fair enough that my social conditioning is doing what it is programmed to do, my impulse to pacify it is not more valuable than my impulse to ignore it.

Because what I learned on my last trip is that what I do with my vast range of impulses, is entirely up to me.

I can choose.


And so I have chosen to continue on this Journey, to deepen and expand the lessons of my last trip; which through their deep impact on me, have already begun to change the authority from which I operate...

• i alone am responsible for my thoughts, for my actions (including reactions), and for the life I choose to live.
• the deepest and most lasting happiness is the experience of serving others, not yourself.
• compassion is without any doubt the path to happiness, and away from anger.
• the peace that I seek will elude me for as long as I lack loving kindness for myself.
• it requires discipline, hard work and deep honesty to understand the mind, which is for me the most interesting subject in the world.
• oh… and I should take it easy, because there’s really not much in this world I can predict or control.

and so, with trust in myself and love for the unknown, I open myself to the road once more.

and in writing all this down, actually, the answer to my question has emerged crystal clear.

this journey does not need a new name. it is my Journey Always Waiting.

really, all of it, even the time in between. it feels so natural, I must have always had it coming. but that’s a different conversion…

so, welcome back to my Journey Always Waiting.

now I know where I am. now, I can go…