Wanderlust in the Time of Coronavirus (A GeoEx eBook)

Wanderlust in the Time of Coronavirus

The Infinite Wonders of Our Everyday World

precious portal to the peace of Japan. Other readers wrote from Australia to California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Minnesota. Reading these, I thought: My cherry blossom is your saguaro cacti is your lemon tree. Each is a tile in the mosaic of our shared humanity. And it is soul-soothing and heart-expanding to feel this global embrace, especially now as we all shelter in place. Lesson #2: That small world contains infinite wonders As I was being transported around the world through these readers’ words, I discovered a homespun site that offers a similarly mind-expanding visual ride. This is the post- quarantine Facebook group “View from my window,” created for home-bound members to post a photo of their everyday view. The result is a breathtaking lesson in the size and variety of our globe, and the extraordinary breadth of what “everyday” holds. Scrolling through the page, I saw a British backyard basking in blue and golden blooms and an Illinois field flowing with freshly fallen snow, a sky-swirling sunrise pasteling Palau and skyscrapers sizzling in dusk-lit Singapore, snow-tipped peaks in Peru and sun-drenched beaches in Brazil, cobbled piazzas in Italy and blue-green bays in Guadeloupe. I saw deer and elk and cockatoos, llamas and lambs and kangaroos. And as I learned last week, I thought anew that stopping and really seeing is the essential clue. These world-spanning views brought home another truth I always re-learn when I’m far away: how one person’s exotic is another person’s everyday. On my last trip to Athens, a humble meal of bread, tomatoes, olives, and feta cheese tasted to me like a gourmet feast. My first morning in Siem Reap, a bicycle pilgrimage to Angkor Wat turned into a dog-dodging, puddle-spraying, mud-spinning magical mystery trot. On my most recent visit to Cusco, exploring the bustling central

market—from pyramids of passion fruit to guinea pigs on a grill, rainbow-colored corn to so much more—became an exhilarating immersion in the daily rites of Peruvian life. Wherever I travel, I marvel that the things I am experiencing—invigorating cities, poignant sites, spectacular landscapes, palate-popping delights—are the everyday reality of people who live in that place. It’s a truth I’ve learned in reverse with the Golden Gate Bridge. I drive over that orange icon every few days—but I’ve met countless visitors who have journeyed halfway around the planet with reverence due for a once-in-a-lifetime, time-stopping view. Lesson #3: Those wonders are within us too Yesterday, as I was again window-view-wandering the world, I happened upon a photo of Balinese rice paddies, and this triggered another memory. I had to search through my journals, but after some planetary page-flipping, I came upon the passage I was seeking, from a journey to Bali in 2012 to speak at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival. I wrote this at the end of a week on the island, when that sacred place bestowed an unexpected grace: On the day of my departure, I walked back through the rice fields, feeling singularly content. I had gotten to do just about everything I had been hoping to do on Bali, I was thinking. There was just one exception—I hadn’t heard a gamelan orchestra. I’d caught snatches of gamelan music at a couple of different performances during the festival, but I hadn’t had that soul-transporting immersion in the music that I remembered vividly from my first trip to Indonesia 34 years before. Just as I was having these thoughts, approaching the end/beginning of the path, the sounds of a gamelan orchestra drifted on the air! I could hardly believe it—it was as if my thoughts had conjured those notes.

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