A new specification: not a travel blog per se, but one focused on the ruminations of traveling: its attendant pauses and double-takes, the fresh eye of a traveler above a river. Movement and discovery have always pleased me best.
I’ll explain the title of this blog. The words themselves just occurred to me as something that might sound nice. But it also relates to the idea of culture viewed in a sudden wallop of understanding, a fresh perspective like what the Zen monks are always after. The equivalent of the possibly-apocryphal “wheeled airplane” that drove up onto Eskimo permafrost many years after the people there had become accustomed to winged vehicles passing overhead.
I remember the time I first recognized the value of standing on one’s head. I was out in Center Campus at my high school on one fine spring evening. The quadrangles there are lined with nice little buildings and neatly-kept trees, and the chapel’s clean white steeple stands at one end. A very nice view, but like all views, it becomes customary for those who pass through it every day at 7:55am on the way to Mathematics. So it was, in an adolescent way, a kind of revelation when I flipped over and looked at things upside-down. I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if the whole world were upside-down and we could walk around on it and hang off it, our heads dangling into space! I stood up. But that’s exactly what we do. Problem solved. Magic is restored to the world of the living.
I’m going to Sweden in a couple of days to visit a grandmother I haven’t seen since I was three and an aunt I’ve never met. I’ll be staying with the father I couldn’t bear to think about for more than a decade, and a stepmother and half-brother I’ve only seen once. We’ll have a cottage on the water in Åhus, just a short drive from Kristianstad, where my father was born and my farmor still lives in an old people’s home. After my dad and his family leave, I’ll have the country to myself for about a week. Perhaps I’ll rent a bike and camp if the weather’s nice.
On Friday I’m flying out of PDX on a direct route to Amsterdam that goes North, not East, in a so-called “great circle” route up over the Northern Territories and into the Arctic. We’ll probably be flying in sunlight the whole time.
So this is the time, my big trip of the year. I’ll try to keep things updated from the road.
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Reimagination and niche-picking
A new specification: not a travel blog per se, but one focused on the ruminations of traveling: its attendant pauses and double-takes, the fresh eye of a traveler above a river. Movement and discovery have always pleased me best.
I’ll explain the title of this blog. The words themselves just occurred to me as something that might sound nice. But it also relates to the idea of culture viewed in a sudden wallop of understanding, a fresh perspective like what the Zen monks are always after. The equivalent of the possibly-apocryphal “wheeled airplane” that drove up onto Eskimo permafrost many years after the people there had become accustomed to winged vehicles passing overhead.
I remember the time I first recognized the value of standing on one’s head. I was out in Center Campus at my high school on one fine spring evening. The quadrangles there are lined with nice little buildings and neatly-kept trees, and the chapel’s clean white steeple stands at one end. A very nice view, but like all views, it becomes customary for those who pass through it every day at 7:55am on the way to Mathematics. So it was, in an adolescent way, a kind of revelation when I flipped over and looked at things upside-down. I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if the whole world were upside-down and we could walk around on it and hang off it, our heads dangling into space! I stood up. But that’s exactly what we do. Problem solved. Magic is restored to the world of the living.
I’m going to Sweden in a couple of days to visit a grandmother I haven’t seen since I was three and an aunt I’ve never met. I’ll be staying with the father I couldn’t bear to think about for more than a decade, and a stepmother and half-brother I’ve only seen once. We’ll have a cottage on the water in Åhus, just a short drive from Kristianstad, where my father was born and my farmor still lives in an old people’s home. After my dad and his family leave, I’ll have the country to myself for about a week. Perhaps I’ll rent a bike and camp if the weather’s nice.
On Friday I’m flying out of PDX on a direct route to Amsterdam that goes North, not East, in a so-called “great circle” route up over the Northern Territories and into the Arctic. We’ll probably be flying in sunlight the whole time.
So this is the time, my big trip of the year. I’ll try to keep things updated from the road.