Whimsy and Water

I was in Kansas City, Missouri on Friday, several states away from the cold and gloom of the northern Midwest. I was there for a conference that turned out to be inspiring and exhilarating, a chance to network and score free coffee. The days were 80 degree ones, full of green and sun and the smell of hot tarmac. Several of us left the conference center for an exploratory walk through a park and down busy streets, into a beautiful old train station that held the sunlight and reflected it from marble floor to gilded ceiling. I felt as if I was in a sacred space, the echoes of hellos and goodbyes murmuring from the walls.

We ate lunch in a square full of families and white tables covered with umbrellas. I leaned back, weightless as a balloon without the heavy drag of a coat. Warm breezes playfully lifted my skirt and for several minutes, I think I entered heaven on a Kansas City afternoon. The day would have been perfect with all of that, but an announcement filled the courtyard and kids of all sizes scampered to a nearby fountain in the square. Adults everywhere turned expectantly and we waited. Soon enough, an unseen symphony started its opening notes and suddenly the fountain came to life, plumes of water dancing and sashaying around in time to the music. Like children, the jets of water skipped and leaped, as if they were drunk on the playful music and the spring sunshine. The strings hit their crescendo and the water rose higher and higher until it came crashing down, the children squealing and shrieking as the water darted out to touch them. My group all sat and watched this beautiful thing we had stumbled upon and I felt dizzy with gladness to be alive, here in Kansas City with warm rays of sun cloaking my arms, surrounded by friends and beauty, music and water. What an opportunity, what a gift to be able to live to see such things. How lucky to be able to bear witness to the fact that whimsy still exists in this world and that we are all prepared to put down our lunches to enjoy it. 

Probing the Depths

It's that time of year again. The one where I start getting restless- gazing longingly at my suitcase, watching travel documentaries, and scouring the library stacks for anything by Freya Stark. How inconvenient. School has barely begun and I'm thinking of anything but digital curation and appraisal methods. Instead, I'm starting a Pinterest board (God help me) and swooning over pictures of Plovdiv and Malin Head.

I have learned through the years that my travel bug is never about a longing to get away. It's more complex than that. It's a longing to meet new people. To gain a fresh perspective, to see the world through other eyes. To feel small, because that is when I learn the most about who I am and my place in the world. Nothing pops my self-centered bubble world like unfamiliarity.

It's so easy to get stuck in my own opinions and worldview and declare that "I AM RIGHT! I have the answers! I understand it ALL!" Until a new place, a new face, shake up my preconceived notions about grief, fear, religion, joy, womanhood, politics, motherhood, or love. (Books do that too, but that's another blog post.) I want to know what the world thinks, how it pulses. I want to know other people, if only to understand the many ways that we are all wrong and all right.  

I want to probe the depths of the gray shades that make up life's answers, shedding the black and white of self-importance.

In Ireland, surrounded by nothing familiar, I discovered a part of myself that existed outside of my daily routine. I was chuckled at in a supermarket for forgetting my money when buying groceries. I talked with an old man about Irish history on an abandoned island in Sligo Bay. We got lost, we misread signs. I was bold, I was nervous. I felt self-conscious and I felt confident, sometimes all in one day. We listened to Irish news radio and realized there is so MUCH happening in the world that we tune out.  

That jolt of unfamiliarity, like an electric shock to my ego, wakes me up and reorients me. In doing so, it also focuses my priorities and lightens my expectations of myself.

It's a world-shaking thing when you look west across the Atlantic, not east. Or when you see the mountains of Colorado from above, rather than below. When you eat blood pudding or watch Irish reality TV or sign up for a library pass in a library that is actually a 14th century church. When you hear what others have to say. When you learn to listen, not to talk. When you stop looking through your own eyes, and start to walk in the moccasins of strangers. There is no greater feeling.