travel

Countdown New Zealand Day 5

06/01/2020 by John Leave a Comment

This is a series of posts that will log some of my thoughts in the month leading up to my moving back to New Zealand.

The hotel room in Philadelphia is overstuffed with our stuff. How is all of this supposed to come with us onto the plane? The answer is that not all of it will. The packing usually doesn’t end until the hours prior to departure. Sometimes it lasts until we check in to the flight and the baggage scales send us scrambling to reshuffle items to balance the luggage out so it fits under the weight limits. It will all go somewhere. It has to.

Countdown New Zealand Day 7

05/30/2020 by John Leave a Comment

This is a series of posts that will log some of my thoughts in the month leading up to my moving back to New Zealand.

The earth rotates into the light of the sun here as it rotates away from it in New Zealand. The world is a big and marvelous place and life is both long and too short. Why spend your whole life in one country when you could also live in another? To each his own I know. Some of us feel so connected to the places we grew up in. Some of us don’t.

Countdown New Zealand Day 9

05/28/2020 by John 1 Comment

This is a series of posts that will log some of my thoughts in the month leading up to my moving back to New Zealand.

Eight years ago, somewhere over Texas…..

New Zealand already seems like a lifetime ago even though it has been just 24 hours since we left the ground in Auckland. Here we are, still in transit.

After so much time invested in the last two months, it seems unfair that the memories, the feeling, of being there can pass so quickly. More lessons in impermanence, a reminder to take care of each moment because it is already in the process of dying. Travel only takes us away during the time it is occurring. As soon as we stop moving, the old, sedentary world comes rushing back into all the spaces that were so recently filled by the wind rushing past as we soared down mountain passes in the Southern Alps on our bikes or bloated by views of an endless blue sky set against the green of the sea and yellows and browns of the land.

Below us now, the Mississippi is meeting its end in a tangle of channels, lakes, and marshes splatter painted in a fan across southern Louisiana. Its waters are becoming a part of the Gulf of Mexico. Our path will likewise be splintered as the demands of jobs, others, and our own distractibility, plugged in once again, take us out in many directions at once. We must strive to find the channel, the depth in our lives that can guide us to what is true and of value.