№ 667. The Map You Make Yourself

Medium

 

 

The Map You Make Yourself

By Jan Richardson

 

You have looked
at so many doors with longing,
wondering if your life lay on the other
side.

For today, choose the door that opens
to the inside.

Travel the most ancient way of all:
the path that leads you
to the center of your life.

№ 252. Solo Travel

Solo Travel Tips

Maybe it's time for a new adventure. Ticking off undone, unfinished businesses is exhausting.

№ 168. Ordinary Risks

The sea wants to kiss the golden shore
The sunlight warms your skin
All the beauty that's been lost before wants to find us again

I can't fight you any more, it's you I'm fighting for
The sea throws rock together but time leaves us polished stones

We can't fall any further
If we can't feel ordinary love
And we can't reach any higher,
If we can't deal with ordinary love

№ 167. Mistakes to the Nth Power

"There is much to learn about life by opening the wonderbox of history."---- Roman Krznaric

№ 12. Love After Love

Viewing Jackson Pollack at the MOMA, New York

№ 10. Calaguas & Bagasbas

The sea looked glassy and calm in the dusk that Saturday. It certainly belied the journey to Calaguas Islands and Bagasbas Beach, Camarines Norte.

№ 9. At the Post Office

On the last day of our trip last year, I bought these postcards from the stamps museum in Singapore. They arrived quite late---3 weeks after I mailed them in the museum. Airmail, although considered snail-paced now, still works! Real postcards look and feel better, too.

Maybe the post office is still relevant in the age of gmail.

№ 6. All Soul’s Day at S.21 (II)

“Better that one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling… if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all.”

--- Robert McAfee Brown, Preface for the 25^th Anniversary Edition of Elie Wiesel’s NIGHT

№ 3. Backpacking in IndoChina: All Soul’s Day at S.21

A room on the third floor

The sign at the entry mandated propriety: no laughter. But noises no longer have to be contained. Or drowned with music. Only the enlarged pictures in each quarter have remained stoic sentinels of the violence inside.

№ 2. Palaui: Sunny & Quiet

Manila at 36˚C is a fusion chamber inside an angry sun. Everything concrete, it seemed, was glowing white. The rest was melting away.

After two hours of greasy and sticky wait at the bus station, the airconditioned bus was a pool of winter. We didn't wait to be called when the blue bus arrived.

The driver read our collective wish: an escape velocity away from the incinerator. And by 2 PM, we finally escaped Manila and headed fast for the highway---light years from the urban heat sink.

Quiet and uncrowded. Not like Boracay's sand and fury.

When we made a turn for the North road, the on board entertainment also began, auspiciously enough, with Ian Veneracion v. Raymart Santiago DVD marathon. Four hours.

№ 1. Commitment to be Waylaid

William H. Murray said it well: “The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issue from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would come his way.”