We all desire this. We all desire to move and expand our horizons. Some seek travel as a means of pleasure. Others seek it as a rite of passage. Countless souls long to become a better person for their travels. With reasons all our own, many will go forth to find what this huge, magnificent world we call Earth can offer them. As such, we all are the captains of our own ship. Above that, only each of us has the star-map to our own vessels. Each route we travel is our own. I have traveled for all the above reasons. However, upon explaining the purpose of this blog to a new friend, I realized that the most beautiful reason to travel is to give love. How many people do all this travel because what they get out of it more than anything is love: experiencing love of mankind and receiving the love of others. I think of the many travel documentaries I have watched, whether by land or sea, and how often I see the purity and sincerity of travelers' interactions with another, especially those traveling on little-to-no money. I think of my own travels last year. The greatest thing I experienced was not the landscape, but "the love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men." Perhaps that is what draws people out of their home ports, embarking on strange and stormy seas, being fed on the love of perfect strangers. I list one a quote from one of my favorite books
I remember meeting people throughout my travels, and I often marveled at the look in their eyes and pondered, "what do they seek? They are looking for something. What??" We seek to experience love in its purity. That is what our soul hungers for. Tale after tale of wanderers I have crossed reveals that what they find more than anything else is the pure love of Christ, manifested in the kind words and deeds of God's children. Respect is love. Civility is love. We ask and plead for it always.
You also come to see the silly majesty of the children of this earth. I just made a bus I could not afford to miss be cause a man with a heavy stupid-looking electric bicycle need it to be wheelchair-lifted onto the bus, and the bus driver was new and never had to do that before, and he kept telling this pretty young newcomer how to do it and it bugged her, you could tell. All the people on the bus got a kick out of it. You always remember the moments you are on fire, consumed spiritually by the playful grandeur of this world-weave, and, just like a child's, your body is affected with tremors and sheer excitability. I loved my night in Denver after meeting the salt-and-pepper-mustached high old man, with a child's smile as big as Texas, and telling it to my friend as I climbed the stairs of a hotel where I'd stay the night with a friend. I was on fire too that morning in Salt Lake City, the wind ripping through the rail-way-lined streets, wild pre-sunrise air checking the heat in my face. Now, going back to my point about how the traveler seeks love more than anything else, I would pose a question: Why does the proverbial Jack Doe who goes traveling, gets nice hotels, plans his sight-seeing and event-attending as if he were still back home at a job, takes airplanes to and from destinations returns from his trip wanting to go back and do it again, or wondering why things weren't more wonderful during their venture? I would call your attention back to the story from "The Dirty Life". The aforementioned Mr. Doe interacted with objects aplenty, it is true. He also spend much hard-earned capital. What he failed to realize that the services and comforts he received also insulated him from other people. His materials abounded, and his increase in relationships was wanting. When I traveled with little funds, I got love. I got relationships. And I was able to give. When you allow yourself to be vulnerable, the love comes. As it is in Christian Theology, so it is upon God's earth. My greyhound ride back was much better this time because I thrived not on the comfort of the seats, but on the comfort and warmth of the smiles and kinship of those beside me. We travel for the thrills it is true, but what of the soul? Does it render us a better person, a holier disciple?
[Mark] was twenty-one years old and had just graduated from Swarthmore with a degree in agricultural science, a major they did not offer but one he'd put together for himself out of classes in biology, chemistry, and economics. He wanted to see what farming was like across America, and to see what rural life was like, and he wanted to see it up close. He set off from his parents house in New Paltz, his bicycle loaded down with a tent and a change of clothes, and rode west. It was summer, and he told his grandmother he'd spend Christmas with her at her home in California. He took very little money with him, partly because he had very little money at the time and apartly because he had a sense that money would insulate him from his adventure. The first week of his trip he rode two days through a difficult patch of construction in New Jersey, feling frazzled by the noise of trucks and by the heat bouncing off the asphalt. Late one afternoon he saw a hiker coming toward him on the other side of the road, loaded down with gear that looked a lot like his. His name was Carl and he'd come from Seattle, biking the same route that Mark was just setting out on, but in the opposite direction. Carl told Mark what an awful trip he was about to have, what an awful country America was, rife with mean-spirited people and patrolled by bully cops who were just looking for an excuse to give you trouble. Then they went their separate ways, Carl pointed east, with Mark's parents' address in his pocket, and Mark pointed west. . . The rest of the trip was exactly like that, full of good people offering food and shelter and kindness, genuine kindness. At the end of his day of travel Mark would look for a certain type of farm, with a garden, not too big and not too polished, but in good repair, without the whiff of desperation. He'd knock on a farmhouse door and ask if it would be all right to camp somewhere on their place. He was never refused, not once. Nine times out of ten the door would open and the next thing he knew he'd be saying grace with a family at their dinner table, and soon after he'd find himself tucked into a bed in the guest room. He'd often spend a day or two working on the place, and in this way he saw all sorts of different farms and met all kinds of farm families. He saw feed lots and citrus plantations. he hoed beans on a small-scale organic vegetable farm and rode a combine through a thousand acres of corn, the corn pouring out of the machine like a smooth gold river. He stopped to get maps at a Chamber of Commerce in the middle of country, and the man at the desk went out to the car and came back with a pack of new socks. 'Here,' he said, 'You always need a good socks on a trip like this.' He stayed four or five days with a family that grew corn and beans in Indiana. The wife, Connie, ran a beauty salon, and after Mark was fed and rested she took him into town and sat him in her chair and washed his hair, twice, because the water was still brown after the first washing, and then she gave him a haircut. Connie still sends him Christmas cards, pictures of her grandkids tucked inside. I'd seen them, so I knew it was true.
I remember meeting people throughout my travels, and I often marveled at the look in their eyes and pondered, "what do they seek? They are looking for something. What??" We seek to experience love in its purity. That is what our soul hungers for. Tale after tale of wanderers I have crossed reveals that what they find more than anything else is the pure love of Christ, manifested in the kind words and deeds of God's children. Respect is love. Civility is love. We ask and plead for it always.
You also come to see the silly majesty of the children of this earth. I just made a bus I could not afford to miss be cause a man with a heavy stupid-looking electric bicycle need it to be wheelchair-lifted onto the bus, and the bus driver was new and never had to do that before, and he kept telling this pretty young newcomer how to do it and it bugged her, you could tell. All the people on the bus got a kick out of it. You always remember the moments you are on fire, consumed spiritually by the playful grandeur of this world-weave, and, just like a child's, your body is affected with tremors and sheer excitability. I loved my night in Denver after meeting the salt-and-pepper-mustached high old man, with a child's smile as big as Texas, and telling it to my friend as I climbed the stairs of a hotel where I'd stay the night with a friend. I was on fire too that morning in Salt Lake City, the wind ripping through the rail-way-lined streets, wild pre-sunrise air checking the heat in my face. Now, going back to my point about how the traveler seeks love more than anything else, I would pose a question: Why does the proverbial Jack Doe who goes traveling, gets nice hotels, plans his sight-seeing and event-attending as if he were still back home at a job, takes airplanes to and from destinations returns from his trip wanting to go back and do it again, or wondering why things weren't more wonderful during their venture? I would call your attention back to the story from "The Dirty Life". The aforementioned Mr. Doe interacted with objects aplenty, it is true. He also spend much hard-earned capital. What he failed to realize that the services and comforts he received also insulated him from other people. His materials abounded, and his increase in relationships was wanting. When I traveled with little funds, I got love. I got relationships. And I was able to give. When you allow yourself to be vulnerable, the love comes. As it is in Christian Theology, so it is upon God's earth. My greyhound ride back was much better this time because I thrived not on the comfort of the seats, but on the comfort and warmth of the smiles and kinship of those beside me. We travel for the thrills it is true, but what of the soul? Does it render us a better person, a holier disciple?
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